Book Review/Heather Seggel

The Burnout Is Real

The coronavirus pandemic has changed the way we live and, for many of us, radically altered the way we work; discussions of what employment will look like going forward have been among the most interesting and hopeful aspects of this disaster. Regardless of your work history, Sarah Jaffe’s “Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone” (Bold Type Books) will give you reasons to rethink your future in the working world. It reports in depth about the ways our work and life Venn diagrams have been manipulated into something more like a single circle, and offers clues as to how we might change that. It could not be more timely.

Divided into two sections, “Work” first looks at the work we often do for free, like cleaning house and caring for loved ones, and how it is turned into undercompensated paid labor. Teaching is a profession that requires education and certification, but teachers’ hard work is minimized when they’re viewed as parental figures, and their willingness to buy school supplies out of what is usually meager pay is weaponized against them as evidence of this love. The retail and nonprofit sectors play similar games, pressuring employees into a work-as-family dynamic, but slamming on the brakes when that family tries to advocate for its needs via unionization.

Things get more complicated when we try to take our passions and make them happen. The art world commands billions of dollars, but we romanticize artists who “starve” as the ones with integrity (and wonder about the richest ones, who often outsource the actual fabrication of their concepts to underpaid minions). Interns perform untold hours of unseen labor, notably in our government, but that experience does not pay bills. Adjunct professorships keep qualified instructors tied up on the subway or freeway, shuttling between schools, trying to cobble together a living from disparate teaching gigs. Technology (especially video games) and sports put forth a powerful narrative about doing what you love, then look the other way as the profits flow away from those actually doing the work. Jaffe interviews people around the country and the world who are struggling with these realities, and notes that each interview subject offered leads to more people in more fields, all facing the same problem. Add in a pandemic, and it’s not just Wal-Mart greeters feeling disgruntled these days. But whatever shall we do about it?

The real pleasure of reading this book is seeing hints throughout of what works, and what might work as our future unfolds. Teacher strikes have been impactful, and women in sports striking for equal pay have politicized their fans and begun to make positive change. Jaffe argues for better workplace conditions (not just free trail mix and ping pong tables on site), and more ethical labor laws, but she’s after something bigger as well: “(B)eyond that, we need a politics of time, a political understanding that our lives are ours to do with as we will.” It may well be the case that, to save our dying planet, many more of us will need to do much less to slow the damage done by capitalism’s frantic advances and allow for repair to begin.

In each of the fields Jaffe explores, race and gender come into play in predictably infuriating ways. In the US, professional women’s soccer has outplayed their male counterparts consistently the last several years, but the pay disparity is huge and indefensible. If you are the sole Black coder on a team, it can be daunting to demand the racial sensitivity that such a dynamic is unlikely to include. These are areas where unionization or other forms of solidarity-building can be invaluable.

It’s not just the big jobs bleeding us dry, either. This very morning I received a message from eBay, asking me to review an out of print book I had purchased through the site. I had already reviewed the seller to help their ratings, now it was time to write a book review — which, hello, is my literal day job — essentially adding content to the site for free. Whatever you do all day, “Work Won’t Love You Back” will make you see it anew, and help you envision what it could be.

A quick correction from two weeks back -- I mistakenly wrote in the 3/15/21 issue that “Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All,” by Martha S. Jones, was published by Seal Books. It was published by Basic Books, and I regret the error.

Heather Seggel is a writer living in Northern California. Email heatherlseggel@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, April 1, 2021

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