Work Won''t Love You Back

Why do you feel pressured to love your job—even when it underpays or exhausts you? Sarah Jaffe’s Work Won’t Love You Back argues that this is not a natural expectation but a political construction. Across history and industries, Jaffe shows how capitalism transformed the promise of meaningful work into a tool for control. When work is presented as a calling, devotion replaces compensation, and passion becomes an excuse for exploitation. Her blunt thesis summarizes it best: work cannot love you back.

From Fordist security to neoliberal devotion

Jaffe begins with a historical pivot: the collapse of the mid-twentieth century Fordist compromise. Unionized manufacturing once offered a stable wage for predictable hours, a structure that allowed workers a sense of life outside the job. As offshoring, automation, and neoliberal austerity undid those guarantees, the new ideal of work as passion replaced the old promise of stability. Politicians and executives—from Reagan and Thatcher to the founders of Silicon Valley—recast workers as entrepreneurs of the self. You were no longer compensated primarily with security but with meaning.

This ideological shift saturated every sector: teachers became caregivers for society’s ills, nonprofit workers were told their emotional commitment was its own reward, and retail staff were expected to serve with a perpetual smile. Capital found emotional fulfillment to be cheaper than pay raises, selling devotion in lieu of dignity.

Love, labor, and gender

The burden of “working for love” disproportionately falls on women and care workers. Jaffe threads together centuries of history—from Silvia Federici’s story of the Great Domestication to the Fordist homemaker ideal—to show that care has been structurally feminized and devalued. In both unpaid domestic work and underpaid professions such as teaching, nursing, or social services, expectations of selflessness enforce inequality. The figure of the mother, whether literal or metaphorical, anchors capitalism’s dependence on unpaid or cheap care.

(Note: Jaffe aligns with feminist labor theory from Selma James’s Wages for Housework campaign and Johnnie Tillmon’s welfare‑rights activism, which reframed domestic labor as real, valuable work deserving social support.)

Precarity and the new dream

“Do what you love” finds its purest form in unpaid or underpaid jobs like internships, art, and tech start‑ups. Jaffe traces this through Disney interns, Silicon Valley’s venture laborers, and Quebec students who struck against mandatory unpaid placements. These workers invest “hope labor”—unpaid time offered in the belief it will yield future rewards—while only those with inherited resources can afford the gamble. Structural inequality gets repackaged as meritocratic opportunity.

Tech’s culture of “playbor” completes this logic. Offices mimic playgrounds to mask surveillance and long hours, and workers pride themselves on devotion to mission over pay. In both tech and academia, the culture of vocation hides austerity: adjunct professors grading in subway cars mirror coders sleeping at their desks.

Resistance and solidarity

Jaffe’s narrative is not only diagnostic; it celebrates workers who are breaking the spell. Teachers’ strikes in Chicago and Los Angeles reframed labor demands as community care. Domestic workers organized through the National Domestic Workers Alliance won legal protections for overtime and rest days. Artists formed W.A.G.E. to demand pay from museums. Even interns and game developers—two groups long seen as voiceless—have unionized and won recognition.

Across these struggles, Jaffe identifies a unifying principle: collective love—solidarity—outperforms coerced love of work. When workers link emotional fulfillment to mutual aid rather than managerial control, they reclaim both dignity and time. The question is not whether you can find meaning in work but whether that meaning is freely chosen or structurally extracted.

Core claim

The labor‑of‑love ethic hides exploitation by individualizing systemic problems. True liberation comes not from loving work more, but from transforming work through collective power—so care, creativity, and love belong to people, not profit.

The rest of the book deepens this argument through sectoral case studies—family, domestic work, teaching, retail, art, nonprofits, tech, sports—and always returns to the same conclusion: love must be reclaimed as solidarity, not as self‑sacrifice.

Jaffe shows that capitalism doesn’t begin at the factory gate. It depends on invisible household labor—raising children, caring for elders, sustaining emotion—that has been assigned to women and devalued as nonwork. This unpaid reproductive labor subsidizes paid economies and structures gender inequality.

The family as economic institution

Through history, the nuclear family has been a political project, not a natural fact. The male breadwinner model of mid‑century Fordism excluded women, immigrants, and Black workers from social protections. Federici’s account of witch‑hunts and enclosure’s "Great Domestication" provides historical depth: unpaid domestic roles were created to sustain capitalist accumulation.

Contemporary welfare reforms—from the 1990s US Workfare model to the UK’s Universal Credit—extend this logic by forcing poor mothers to labor for benefits or face sanctions. Jaffe uses Ray Malone’s life as a case study: an artist‑mother navigating isolation and stigma, punished for both caregiving and poverty.

Feminist alternatives

Competing feminist movements reveal the politics of reproductive labor. Liberal feminists like Betty Friedan sought access to paid work, while welfare rights leaders such as Johnnie Tillmon demanded recognition and income for caregiving itself. The Wages for Housework campaign reframed home labor as coerced productivity deserving pay and social power. Malone’s advocacy for universal basic income continues this line: survival should not depend on unpaid gendered labor.

Jaffe’s point to you is direct: real freedom for families and caregivers requires collective provision—public childcare, healthcare, housing—not individualized “self‑care.” Care must be recognized as social infrastructure, not as personal virtue.

You may think of the home as private, but for millions it is a workplace. Domestic and intimate labor—cleaning, caring, nursing—form the backbone of economies yet remain the least protected and most exploited jobs. Jaffe reveals how intimacy, race, and migration shape this sector.

“Just like family” as ideology

Through stories like Adela Seally’s, a nanny in New Rochelle, Jaffe shows how the rhetoric of being “one of the family” masks exploitation. Caring for children involves skill, judgment, and emotional effort—but the intimacy that makes the work meaningful also allows employers to skirt boundaries, expecting long hours for low pay.

Race, migration, and hierarchy

From slavery and laundress strikes to present‑day migrant caregivers, domestic labor has long been racialized and devalued. Many workers are immigrants whose legal precarity compounds vulnerability: live‑in conditions, deportation threats, and wage theft. Jaffe connects this to the global “care chain,” where women from poorer nations provide care in richer ones while leaving their own families behind.

Organizing care

Despite isolation, domestic workers have built formidable movements. Dorothy Bolden’s National Domestic Workers Union and today’s NDWA secured the first Domestic Worker Bill of Rights. These victories prove that even atomized workers can win when they form networks based on shared conditions. Jaffe highlights how care should be treated as public infrastructure—if it collapses, society collapses. Your takeaway: dignity in private homes requires public rights and commitments.

Essential insight

The home is an economic site. When care labor is recognized and organized, it exposes the myth that love justifies exploitation.

Teaching epitomizes the contradictions of loving your work. Society expects teachers to nurture and uplift while paying them less than other professionals. Jaffe traces how teachers’ strikes reveal the political stakes of care under austerity.

From vocation to leverage

Rosa Jimenez, an LA teacher and organizer, embodies the double bind: called to love her students but blamed when deprived schools fail. Historically, teachers like Margaret Haley built early unions such as the Chicago Teachers Federation, linking pedagogy to democracy. Yet Cold War purges and professionalization weakened that radical lineage.

Bargaining for the common good

Recent strikes—Chicago (2012) and Los Angeles (2019)—revive it. Karen Lewis, Alex Caputo‑Pearl, and Jimenez helped redefine union bargaining to include community demands: nurses in every school, class‑size caps, and an end to privatization. These actions frame teachers not as servants but as public stewards, tying their well‑being to that of students.

For you, the lesson is vivid: when care workers act collectively, their love for community turns into structural power. The classroom becomes a political arena where solidarity replaces sacrifice.

Retail exposes the everyday mechanics of emotional labor. Workers must smile, manage frustration, and embody brand loyalty while enduring erratic schedules and low pay. Jaffe uses Toys “R” Us veteran Ann Marie Reinhart’s story to illuminate how finance and technology reshape service jobs.

Emotional labor and exploitation

Borrowing from Arlie Hochschild, Jaffe defines emotional labor as the management of feelings for profit. Retail converts empathy into productivity metrics. Reinhart spent decades constructing cheerful customer experiences—until private equity’s leveraged buyouts bankrupted the company, leaving thousands jobless. Her organizing afterward helped expose Wall Street’s role and returned $20 million in severance to workers.

Algorithmic scheduling and resistance

Tech‑driven scheduling—apps assigning last‑minute “clopening” shifts—extends managerial control. Yet cities like Emeryville have won fair‑workweek ordinances, requiring notice and compensation for changes. Jaffe highlights groups like United for Respect that turn social networks into organizing spaces. The message for you: retail’s hyper‑visibility can be repurposed into collective action; the same energy used to maintain a customer smile can fuel a picket line.

Working for a mission can feel noble—until you realize that moral language often replaces fair pay. Jaffe dissects the nonprofit sector as a mirror of neoliberal governance: charities deliver vital services yet depend on private donors who shape priorities.

From charity to the nonprofit industrial complex

Tracing philanthropy from Carnegie to modern foundations, Jaffe shows how the tax code institutionalized elite influence. Funders define what counts as solvable, pragmatic, or respectable. Hence movements often contort themselves to donor expectations rather than public accountability. During crises like 2008 or COVID‑19, nonprofits filled state gaps without stable support, revealing their fragility.

Workers inside the moral machine

Through Ashley Brink’s unionization at Planned Parenthood, Jaffe captures the paradox: staff dedicated to care face burnout, low pay, and anti‑union tactics. Mission rhetoric becomes a shield for managers. True sustainability, she argues, requires empowering nonprofit workers themselves as part of social change. You cannot cure exploitation while reproducing it internally.

Key reflection

Good intentions do not substitute for structural justice. Moral pride without worker power sustains, not subverts, inequality.

Artists, interns, and adjuncts all inhabit the intersection of aspiration and insecurity. Jaffe collects their stories to expose the myth that creative or intellectual passion compensates for low pay or none at all.

Art as labor

Artists like Kate O’Shea craft socially engaged art that doubles as activism, but precarious funding forces constant self‑promotion. Howard Becker’s concept of "art worlds" reminds you that every cultural product rests on many underpaid workers—installers, educators, curators—whose visible passion hides economic precarity. Organizing efforts such as W.A.G.E. and museum‑union campaigns reclaim art’s collaborative character.

Interns and academics

Internships epitomize hope labor—unpaid work justified as training. The Quebec CUTEs reframed it as gendered exploitation and struck en masse, forcing the state to respond with stipends. Meanwhile, academia follows the same pattern under “adjunctification.” Katherine Wilson’s endless commute between CUNY and Fordham, grading in transit, shows how elite institutions rely on contingent faculty. Union victories like Fordham’s SEIU contract prove that intellectual work needs organized labor as much as any factory floor.

Both artists and academics demonstrate that creativity requires material security. Jaffe’s advice: treat passion as fuel for organizing, not justification for sacrifice.

Few industries better illustrate love’s exploitation than technology and gaming. Jaffe explores a culture where work feels like play—“playbor.” Perks and passion cloak overwork, surveillance, and inequality.

Gamified devotion

At studios like Studio Gobo, Kevin Agwaze describes endless “crunch” periods normalized by excitement and fandom. Gamification tools like Amazon’s performance dashboards transform drudgery into competition, keeping workers voluntarily “engaged.” Studios thrive on turnover while calling exploitation “team spirit.”

Organizing new frontiers

Resistance has emerged through Game Workers Unite (GWU) and tech-worker alliances. Agwaze and peers affiliated with IWGB, linking digital developers with cleaners and gig workers under one labor umbrella. Their demands—living wages, protections for QA and marginalized workers, and corporate accountability—begin to shift a notoriously atomized field. Online solidarity networks, from Slack channels to Twitter campaigns, are transforming gamer communities into audiences for labor rights.

The lesson is clear: even the industries that sell joy and creativity rely on disciplined, collective labor. When workers unite, they turn play into solidarity.

Sports dramatize competition but conceal labor. Jaffe reframes athletes as workers—and some of the most visible organizers in the world. Through case studies like Meghan Duggan’s hockey strike and Kain Colter’s college union drive, you see how love of the game becomes a weapon used against athletes until they reclaim it as collective strength.

Women’s hockey and collective courage

In 2017, Duggan and the US women’s national hockey team refused to play without fair pay and maternity protections. Their boycott forced USA Hockey to negotiate a structured contract and inspired creation of the PWHPA. Passion no longer meant silent endurance; it meant solidarity.

Political protest as labor action

From Kaepernick’s kneel to the 2020 multileague strike after police violence, athletes applied labor leverage to moral protest. Jaffe argues this exposes the core contradiction: those who generate immense profit can halt the spectacle by withholding their bodies. The arena becomes another workplace ripe for transformation.

You learn that visibility is power. When even celebrated professionals demand fair treatment, they remind society that no job—however glamorous—is exempt from exploitation or collective action.

Jaffe closes by asking what love might mean outside capitalism’s grasp. If work can’t love you back, how can you redirect care toward people and community? Her answer: reclaim time and rebuild solidarity.

Time as liberation

Demands for shorter workweeks and guaranteed income are not utopian—they are ecological and humane necessities. Free time undermines productivity’s moral tyranny and aligns human well‑being with planetary limits. (Note: Jaffe echoes Autonomy Institute’s research linking reduced hours to lower carbon footprints.)

Solidarity as love in action

Movements like Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and teachers’ strikes build miniature utopias: kitchens, childcare, care circles. These are laboratories for a world where love and power coexist. Jaffe insists that joy and struggle are intertwined—collective care, not individual hustle, is the real foundation of freedom.

Closing reminder

Love is political. When reclaimed from managerial scripts, it becomes a weapon for dignity, time, and collective justice.

For you, Jaffe’s counsel is practical: organize your workplace, demand boundaries, and share care as solidarity. Work should serve life—not the other way around.