This book has many good solid examples of workers who are exploited for their love for their work, but basically the title says it all: work (and employers) doesn’t love you back. The author has good examples and narratives, and good histories of each industry, but is kind of all over the place with her main premise. I didn’t get much out of the conclusion.

My takeaways:
- It’s no question that all people should be paid adequately for their work based on their value and contributions to the employer. However, employers will use your passion or sense of calling to get away with paying you less whenever they can get away with it.
- The myth of labor-of-love is cracking under its own weight because work itself no longer works. Neoliberalism/ late-stage capitalism is counterproductive to human development and well-being of humanity.
- Autonomy (UK), 2019 report (on climate change): “... provided current levels of carbon intensity of our economies and current levels of productivity, how much work can we afford.” ( )

The introduction was good, but then the first chapter went off on tangents that I couldn’t see the point of, and I didn’t fancy trying to wade my way through an entire book of that. ( )

Fuck you, pay me. Saved you time reading this trash. ( )

Audiobooks that clock in at 13 hours usually signal that I will start to disengage at some point, but that never happened here. I really appreciated the way Jaffe pulled about as many sectors of contemporary Western economy as she did to look at the ways capitalism has distorted our notions of work and exploited us. Oof. Happy Monday... ( )

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!) ( )