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A review by aimiller
Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
This book is so good and so important for folks to read in really industry but especially in those areas she covers in the book. Jaffe takes really an IMMENSE amount of research (it's deeply impressive actually,) and covers so many fields, especially those that are devalued gendered work. As a grad student, I deeply appreciate her covering adjunct and grad student labor and revealing how the (gendered!) labor of teaching is left up to them while tenured professors at many institutions get to drop their teaching responsibilities to pursue their own academic work.
The other chapters are all also excellent--I think the tech labor chapter also was fascinating, especially looking at how some of the myths of the industry lead to the exploitation within the industry (recruiting people who dropped out of college so we don't have to pay them as much, for example) though I maybe was more interested because I didn't have as much knowledge as I did about the struggles of teacher unions and the work around care labor that is being organized.
I do wish she had covered her own field, or at least freelance work generally, because I think there's so much going on there that is ultimately related to this (how are you asked to care about your OWN work as part of freelancing), and the problems of many of these are tied up in "bad bosses" but I think it's also worth looking into ways that freelancers have been organizing and what that might look like. But I think she already covered SO MUCH that I understand why she didn't, and she does it all--the history of these fields, the economic aspects, narratives of organizing, interviews with workers--so I'll just wait for another book maybe.
But I do think everyone should read this and reconsider their relationship to work that asks you to be devoted to your job in some capacity, so please get it asap! (And then try and organize your workplace!)
The other chapters are all also excellent--I think the tech labor chapter also was fascinating, especially looking at how some of the myths of the industry lead to the exploitation within the industry (recruiting people who dropped out of college so we don't have to pay them as much, for example) though I maybe was more interested because I didn't have as much knowledge as I did about the struggles of teacher unions and the work around care labor that is being organized.
I do wish she had covered her own field, or at least freelance work generally, because I think there's so much going on there that is ultimately related to this (how are you asked to care about your OWN work as part of freelancing), and the problems of many of these are tied up in "bad bosses" but I think it's also worth looking into ways that freelancers have been organizing and what that might look like. But I think she already covered SO MUCH that I understand why she didn't, and she does it all--the history of these fields, the economic aspects, narratives of organizing, interviews with workers--so I'll just wait for another book maybe.
But I do think everyone should read this and reconsider their relationship to work that asks you to be devoted to your job in some capacity, so please get it asap! (And then try and organize your workplace!)