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Work Won't Love You Back
- How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone
- Narrated by: Sarah Jaffe
- Length: 12 hrs and 59 mins
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Work Won't Love You Back
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Publisher's Summary
A deeply-reported examination of why "doing what you love" is a recipe for exploitation, creating a new tyranny of work in which we cheerily acquiesce to doing jobs that take over our lives.
You're told that if you "do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life." Whether it's working for "exposure" and "experience," or enduring poor treatment in the name of "being part of the family," all employees are pushed to make sacrifices for the privilege of being able to do what we love.
In Work Won't Love You Back, Sarah Jaffe, a preeminent voice on labor, inequality, and social movements, examines this "labor of love" myth - the idea that certain work is not really work, and therefore should be done out of passion instead of pay. Told through the lives and experiences of workers in various industries - from the unpaid intern, to the overworked teacher, to the nonprofit worker and even the professional athlete - Jaffe reveals how all of us have been tricked into buying into a new tyranny of work.
As Jaffe argues, understanding the trap of the labor of love will empower us to work less and demand what our work is worth. And once freed from those binds, we can finally figure out what actually gives us joy, pleasure, and satisfaction.
What listeners say about Work Won't Love You Back
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Bethani Jade
- 2022-01-04
Critique of the Career Woman Trope
As a millennial woman, a lot of my friends are choosing to dedicate their lives to careers rather than families. Power to them. I enjoyed this alternative take that working alone is not usually fulfilling in itself. Jaffe ties the modern hustle culture to the labour movement that came before elegantly, and she grounds her feminist labour theories in real-life examples pulled from the first year of the pandemic. An excellent and timely read for essential workers in the U.S. and Canada.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Amazon Customer
- 2022-10-25
Breath of fresh air
I really needed to read this, during this collective anxiety about life, work, and relationships. The history lessons provided about work, working classes, and labour organization are a great reminder to not take what we have now for granted, and what we have lost along the way. The narrative was engaging and poignant, albeit drawn out at times, but overall I loved this book.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Tyson Compton
- 2021-05-12
A Must Read For Everyone
If you work in a job, or if you're a student, or you're unionized - or not - or you think you might some day do something where you exchange your time, energy, expertise, etc. for money, you need to read this book; and more importantly, you need to share this book with those you care about.
Jaffe skillfully illustrates the problems facing labour through stories with no shortage of supporting evidence. She shows in chapter after how the exploitation of the working class is exasperated by society's acceptance and normalization of the "labour of love", and what every day people are doing to change it. Highly recommended.
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