Sarah Jaffe > Quotes

“The compulsion to be happy at work, in other words, is always a demand for emotional work from the worker. Work, after all, has no feelings. Capitalism cannot love.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“The labor of love begins, then, in the home. We are still told that the work of cleaning and cooking, of nursing wounds, of teaching children to walk and talk and read and reason, of soothing hurt feelings and smoothing over little crises, comes naturally to women. These things are assumed not to be skills, not to be learned, as other skills are, through practice. And this assumption has crept from the home into the workplaces of millions of people—not all of them women—and has left them underpaid, overstretched, and devalued. Our willingness to accede that women’s work is love, and that love is its own reward, not to be sullied with money, creates profits for capital.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“We want to call work what is work so that eventually we might rediscover what is love.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“creative work is romantic love, based in a different kind of self-sacrifice and voluntary commitment that is expected, on some level, to love you back. Yet work never, ever loves you back.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“If we recalled why we work in the first place—to pay the bills—we might wonder why we’re working so much for so little.4”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“Neoliberalism tried to sell us on freedom not from work but through work.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“The ideals of freedom and choice that neoliberalism claims to embrace function, paradoxically, as a mechanism for justifying inequality. The choice is yours, but so are the costs for choosing wrong.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“From the beginning of publicly funded schooling in the United States (and Europe), teachers have been pressed to treat their work as a calling, to dedicate long hours outside of the classroom to it, and to do this out of care for their students. Yet such expectations have existed in tension with the idea that teachers’ skills are little more than a “natural” inclination to care for children, rooted in a love that is simultaneously too big and too unimportant to be fairly remunerated. Like the work done in the home—paid or unpaid—teachers’ work is considered both necessary and not really work at”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“Under capitalism, as Morris argued, whether or not you liked your job—or, like many of us, find things to love and loathe about it at different times—would always be secondary to whether you were producing a profit.

Jaffe, Sarah. Work Won’t Love You Back”
― Sarah Jaffe

“The problems of today’s nonprofit sector are outgrowths of this necessary inequality: nonprofits exist to try to mitigate the worst effects of an unequal distribution of wealth and power, yet they are funded with the leftovers of the very exploitation the nonprofits may be trying to combat.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“The work it takes to suppress one’s true feelings, to maintain a calm smile and the appearance of enjoyment, in order to maintain the customer’s mood is familiar to anyone who works with people.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“The ownership class these days does tend to work, and indeed, to make a fetish of its long hours.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“The majority of people who work in the arts will identify themselves as liberal to left wing, often radical left wing. This is going from the poorest artist to the highest paid curators in institutions....But if this is the case—that we are all in a field where everyone is left-wing values then why are we all agreed that the art world is a giant piece of capitalist shit that is relying on private capital that exploits its workers, that exploits it's artists, that relies on unpaid labor? This to me is living proof that art can't change the work and we need to organize. Artists need to realize how little power we all actually have and how power needs to be built. It doesn't come naturally and isn't a divine gift you get by being an artist. --Kerry Guinan”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“Freedom was there, the neoliberals argued, you just had to purchase it.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“If caring work is familial love, based in the all-sacrificing love of the mother, creative work is romantic love, based in a different kind of self-sacrifice and voluntary commitment that is expected, on some level, to love you back. Yet work never, ever loves you back. The compulsion to be happy at work, in other words, is always a demand for emotional work from the worker.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“Japanese workers have been subjected to a “smile scanner” that gauges how well they project happiness on the job—an automated test of emotional labor.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“Teachers like Jimenez in the United States make something like 21 percent less than workers with similar education levels in other fields, and yet for all that they sacrifice—for all that they love their work—they are still often blamed when students fail to transcend the circumstances in which they live. Teachers tend to stick it out, staying on the job even as budget cuts mean class sizes grow and resources shrink—and even as they buy toilet paper and food for their students out of their own paychecks.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“This love is supposed to be part of the compensation of doing our job. But people are less comfortable considering that love is not compensation; love is work.…”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“You feel punished for having a child by yourself as a single woman. Motherhood is throwing a lot of women into poverty. Or, a lot of women just make the decision, ‘I can’t afford to have a child.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“If caring work is familial love, based in the all-sacrificing love of the mother, creative work is romantic love, based in a different kind of self-sacrifice and voluntary commitment that is expected, on some level, to love you back. Yet work never, ever loves you back.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“Most importantly, today's activists have discovered the power of making trouble, of causing disruptions. Disrupting things, says longtime labor organizer Stephen Lerner, is the best way for regular people to exercise some power. It isn't about winning everyone over to one's side; it is, instead, about finding a way to disrupt the day-to-day existence of those who do have power, to make them feel the crisis that they have inflected on millions of people. Disruption, whether it be blocking a street, going on strike, or occupying a space, is a way to ensure that the message - that something has got to give - gets across.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Necessary Trouble: Americans In Revolt

“High on the job-growth list, too, are computer programmers, who might earn higher salaries but are also expected to demonstrate passion for their work—though they show it through their long hours more than in outpourings of emotion.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“FOR A WHILE, TEACHERS ACQUIESCED TO THE CHANGES. “WE’RE USED TO being like, ‘OK, whatever you want me to do, I’ll do it, because we all care about what’s best for kids,”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“In lieu of providing unionized jobs with decent conditions, the new retail stores learned from Walmart to pay lip service to workers’ wants and needs, to embrace “teamwork” while making sure workers didn’t actually team up enough to organize.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“For decades, for the housewife, keeping a tidy, loving home had been a task deeply tied up with her identity. To fail to keep a good home was to fail to be a good woman.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“The idea that the work is provided for love serves to paper over the fact that sometimes workers have needs that cannot or should not be subsumed by those of the people they serve.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“Our place in the hierarchy of capitalist society is decided not by how hard we work but by any number of elements out of our control, including race, gender, and nationality.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“Haley was a fierce critic of industrial elites, telling a crowd, "Two ideals are struggling for supremacy in American life today; one the industrial ideal dominating through the superiority of commercialism, which subordinates the worker to the product and the machines; the other, the ideal of democracy, the ideal of the educators, which places humanity above all machines, and demands that all activity shall be the expression of life.”
― Sarah Jaffe

“the work of parenting is not considered important enough to pay for, yet if you demonstrate that you have other priorities beyond the home, you’ll be castigated as a bad mother.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“Neoliberalism encourages us to think that everything we want and need must be found with a price tag attached.13”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone