Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

Sarah Jaffe

Jan 2021 · Hachette Audio · Narrated by Sarah Jaffe

About this audiobook

A deeply-reported examination of why "doing what you love" is a recipe for exploitation, creating a new tyranny of work in which we cheerily acquiesce to doing jobs that take over our lives.

You're told that if you "do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life." Whether it's working for "exposure" and "experience," or enduring poor treatment in the name of "being part of the family," all employees are pushed to make sacrifices for the privilege of being able to do what we love.

In Work Won't Love You Back, Sarah Jaffe, a preeminent voice on labor, inequality, and social movements, examines this "labor of love" myth—the idea that certain work is not really work, and therefore should be done out of passion instead of pay. Told through the lives and experiences of workers in various industries—from the unpaid intern, to the overworked teacher, to the nonprofit worker and even the professional athlete—Jaffe reveals how all of us have been tricked into buying into a new tyranny of work.

As Jaffe argues, understanding the trap of the labor of love will empower us to work less and demand what our work is worth. And once freed from those binds, we can finally figure out what actually gives us joy, pleasure, and satisfaction.

Ratings and reviews

This was a pleasure and an education. Weeks after finishing, Sarah's well-chosen, well-enunciated words still ring about in my head. Not only did I learn but I felt. From her own experience to those of various people caught up in our "modern" world of labor, she illuminates the systems of manipulation undergirding contemporary work culture and weaves them back through history in way that is fascinating, inspiring, heart-breaking and enraging. With Sarah's help, I now grasp how the threads connect. The clarity with which she writes is a gift not only to those whose stories she tells and to the plights she highlights but to her readers too. Well, listener in my case. After hearing Sarah on podcasts/shows and reading her pieces, I knew going in that I was in the hands of a professional communicator but after devouring the episodes over several days — in audio form, it's like a podcast series; each chapter about an hour — I realized she is also a teacher, a lover, a fighter, a comrade, a friend and someone I'm grateful is doing the work she's doing, as stressful as it must be at times. By the time it ended, I only wished for more, and I am eager to read (listen to?) her other book, Necessary Trouble, and to support the vital work she does. I have and will continue to sing her praise. She deserves so much more. It also sounds like Sarah could use a nice long break to rest and muster up. The struggle is far from over.

About the author

Sarah Jaffe is a Type Media Center Fellow and an independent journalist covering the politics of power, from the workplace to the streets. She is the author of Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt, and her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the New Republic, the American Prospect, and many other publications. She is the cohost, with Michelle Chen, of Dissent magazine's Belabored podcast, as well as a columnist at The Progressive and New Labor Forum.