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Then there’s the story that is on a million WeWork tote bags now: “Do what you love.” And that’s even a story I was told growing up by my parents who were small-business owners. They’re doing it for the money and because it’s going to give them a decent life outside of work. When I went to the Lordstown factory in Ohio to talk to people who’ve been making cars for, in some of their cases, most of their lives, they’re proud of the cars they put out, but they’re not doing it to bring themselves fulfillment.
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If you’re smiling while mining coal, I want to know what drugs you’re on because that stuff is not fun. The economy of the mid-century, the economy that Donald Trump is always giving us these nostalgic callbacks to-”We’re going to bring back the factory jobs, we’re going to bring back the coal mines”-in those jobs, you didn’t have to pretend to like it. But I’m interested in where that myth originated, on a macro level. You write about interns, for example, being told by individual bosses that they should be grateful to be working even if they’re not paid for their work. The rest of my wage is paid by the customer anyway.” And so I feel like this has been haunting me since then. You don’t get my career aspirations and hopes and dreams for $2.13 an hour. And the owner was like, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” And I was like, “Dude, you’re going to pay me $2.13 an hour. When I moved to Denver when I was 22, I was interviewed for this job at this sushi restaurant. It’s terrible, and you constantly have to pretend you like it. I’ve had various service-industry jobs since I was 14-everything from scooping ice cream to making coffee to waiting tables, all public-facing, “paste a smile on,” emotional labor kind of work. You’ve been reporting on labor issues for a long time, but how did you come to the revelation that the credo “do what you love” is used to exploit workers?
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The capitalist system, she says, depends on you believing that deception. In her book, Jaffe, a longtime labor journalist, says large corporations specifically conjured this fable in order to pay workers less and give them fewer benefits. “Even as the old story–that housework, and particularly motherhood, was inherently satisfying–hung on, the new myth, of work-as-liberation, grew up around it,” she writes. After all, their bosses argued, they should be grateful for the non-monetary rewards. And when women entered the workforce en masse looking for a paycheck, they were offered less money than their male peers. 26, argues that the “love your work” mantra is a myth of capitalism.įor most of human history workers clocked into their jobs knowing that “work sucked.” But in the 1970s, just when manufacturing began to die and labor movements began to lose ground, bosses started handing down aphorisms like, “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Service people were told to plaster a smile onto their faces.
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But author Sarah Jaffe, whose book hits shelves on Jan. Work Won’t Love You Back is a provocative title for book coming out at a time when many Americans are logging extra hours during the pandemic.