I would recommend this book to anyone.
we really do need to start having more conversations about this topic
this book is great to have to assist in that conversation

I needed this book years ago, but I'm so glad it exists now. It provides some understanding for how we got here, and some ideas for how we can change things -- particularly now, as people start thinking about what a post-COVID workplace might look like. Let's hope enough people are reading it.

*I received a free ARC of this book by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I was really intrigued by the premise of this book. As soon as I saw the title, I immediately wanted to read it, especially when we're living in a time when the pandemic has forced us to reflect on our relationship with work.

The first bit was really interesting and I was quite intrigued. The book is incredibly well-researched and Sarah Jaffe is a good writer. However, I soon found that it became too dense and I lost interest. I understand that she wanted to provide a thorough deep dive into the history of work to clearly pinpoint where we went wrong, but personally, I found it a bit much.

I also have to say that I was expecting a bit more. Yes, we know work is horrible but I think I was expecting that there would be more of a focus on possible solutions.

This book reminded me a lot of Can't Even by Anne Helen Peterson - which I also liked but had the same feedback - I wish there was more provided in terms of what we can do to fix things.

Such a wonderful, thought-provoking read on how work has been transformed into ones passion versus ones vocation, through the breakdown of unions, worker protections, and the increasing accessibility demanded of workers through technology. This will make you examine all of the lies you've been told about how you should do what you love and that work is only valuable if its something you have a passion for, as a way to make you complicit into being taken advantage of through low wages, long hours, and more.

Thank you to @netgalley and #perseusbooksgroup for my ARC.... ok, so I totally thought this was going to be a self-help book on work/life balance, but it’s not! A deeply researched book on the history of capitalism, neoliberalism and how the notion of “loving what you do” is brainwashing workers to be exploited and underpaid. Fascinating! But a long one so be prepared to dive in. 🌟🌟🌟🌟

Our lives, our world and our work are changing rapidly. This book offers some fresh perspective on how to strike the balance many of us seek in our lives.

"Work Won't Love You Back" is a well-researched text that reviews fields of work in which workers tend to be underpaid and expected to love their work (clients, patients, students, fans, etc...). Jaffer reviews work through a Marxist lens and argues that the current trends in employment-especially in larger corporations-are both unsustainable and unhealthy to people and to the environment.

I enjoyed Jaffe's text. Her premise is catchy. More than that, her main argument is one that many people can relate to...One that I can relate to as well. At times, I do feel that the text is a bit more academic. For example, if people don't know about Marxism, then readers may want to, if nothing else, quickly read up on it/on Marx. That being said, I really enjoyed how Jaffe interspersed people's stories in each chapter. It gave a clearer picture of the ways in which people have been treated by employers, challenges in laws favouring corporations over employees (and vice versa), and how people are coming together to fight for things such as better wages, workplace safety and better conditions for clients/patients/students/etc...

Overall, I think that the idea that people are meant to love their jobs and love working is a lie that we've been fed in order to spend a lot of money on an education that no longer has the same returns. As an BIPOC female in my late 30s, I've had questions about my English language speaking, reading and writing capabilities, whether I'm married, why I haven't been able to get a job in Canada, etc...I haven't been able to get a job in Canada that paid enough to pay my OSAP (Ontario Student Loan) and bank student loan back each month. At 34, I was on the verge of filing for bankruptcy even though my debt was less than $25,000 (including my student loans). My advice: a job is a way to earn an income, so study in a field that will make you money. If I could go back and do it all again, I'd go to college and become an electrician.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Bold Type Books for the ARC of this nonfiction title.

“Doing what you love” is a tool to get us to work harder for less money and put work, not loved ones, at the center of our universe. Yeah, I said, and so did Sarah Jaffe, in different words. Work Won’t Love You Back is a reflection and history on how companies have turned the work family into a way to exploit, underpay, and control our lives for profit. Let’s be honest, it’s been working, but the holes are there, and people are starting to see them. Work is falling apart, and if we won’t this glorious Capitalist society to thrive, we’re going to have to do more than just tell people to love their work. We’re going to have to start paying them again.

This book is a call to action to demand more pay for our work and to work less, and it’s got the receipts to back it up. Each section is devoted to a different type of work and or a different group of people, particularly women who are historically seen as caregivers without compensation, and how we got here. All of this resonated heavily with me, as I have been completely rethinking my existence over the last 4 years or so, and I don’t really want to work. At all. That’s my career goal, so I’m taking steps to reduce my workload in the long run, and even though it’s slow going, it’s nice to have a goal, and books like this that prove we’ve been gaslighted for a long time and it’s not likely to stop anytime soon.

If you’re fed up with work, or you feel weird but can’t quite verbalize it, check this book out. It does a great job at articulating the disenchantment many of us are feeling in our toxic corporate environments.

This book is exactly what I'm interested in, although I couldn't finish all of it. The writing is good and I appreciate Jaffe's stance and thorough research, but as it progressed it became somewhat too dense and academic for me and I lost interest. This is more of a reflection on me and my timing with this book rather than the book itself. Jaffe does seem to deliver on the promise of analyzing the myth of loving work and how it results in working class people chasing a labour ideal that simply doesn't exist, and the ways in which late capitalism fuels this fallacy.

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe
Publisher: Perseus Books, PublicAffairs, Bold Type Books
Genre: Multicultural Interest
Release Date: January 26, 2021

Work Won't Love You Back by Sarah Jaffe is the book I wish I had found in the early 2000's when I embarked on a 16 year sentence with a job I hated but felt I couldn't leave. I finally left that job in early 2019 and have almost worked through the emotional baggage from the previous job.

I found this book to be well written and easy to read. There is so much information in here. It was an interesting take on work and love.

I'm so grateful to Sarah Jaffe, Bold Type Books, and NetGalley for providing me with a free copy of this ARC ebook in exchange for my honest review.

Extremely well researched book, exploring the modern issues of working. The book is thought out and but the information comes off quite dense. Jaffe covers history, cultural expectations within society, personal experience, politics, and capitalism. Though these topics are relevant to the workplace it’s not what I quite had in mind for this book when first requesting it. I would’ve liked this a lot more if there were less talk of politics as well. It also speaks about how COVID has affect our work life this last year. Overall, I would say I enjoyed this but is far more detailed than necessary or expected.

Thank you NetGalley and Perseus Books, Public Affairs for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

An incredibly in-depth exploration into contemporary workplace issues, Jaffe draws from many disciplines and forms—labour history, social and cultural criticism, personal anecdote—to underscore the ways in which folks are exploited by capitalist systems. This was hard to read at times because of its bleakness, other times because of the density of Jaffe’s content; I appreciated the extensiveness of her research but found myself sometimes in a reading lull or rut that was hard to get out of. It was also interesting to see these workplace issues framed in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I think this would’ve been a 4-star read if I’d gone into this expecting something denser, content-heavy, driven by politics and criticism. I’d just finished Laziness Doesn’t Exist by Devon Price, which reads more personally and accessibly—and both books have their merits, but I think I came into this one with the wrong expectations and mindset.

Bottom line: A timely, important piece of work (no pun intended) that will be rewarding if one enjoys at-times verbose explorations into politics, history, economy, culture, and the lives of individuals in these systems.


Thank you NetGalley and Perseus Books, Public Affairs for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This feels like two different books. I was riveted by the first half, but gave up in the second. Could have been so much better if it was all like the first half

Thanks to NetGalley and Bold Type Books for the free e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Work Won't Love You Back by Sarah Jaffe explains exactly its title -- using experiences from a multitude of workers in several different fields, including education, tech, sports, interns, and more to describe how the same problems affect everyone now that our culture has moved toward the "labor of love" concept.

I definitely appreciated a lot of Jaffe's concepts here, and the writing was clear. However, I struggled with how quickly sections in each chapter moved from person to person. I much more enjoyed when Jaffe zoomed out and focused on the culture as whole, especially in her conclusion. While this was an issue for me, not necessarily for everyone, the macro level analysis really worked for me.

I really appreciated Jaffe's analysis here, as I thought I loved the field I work in (not necessarily my current job though). I'll definitely be thinking about some of her points for a long time, especially when I end up working overtime nearly every week at a job I don't even like most of the time. Her question about what people would do if they didn't have to work so much, and the conclusion that people always circle back around to the fact that they have to work, is going to stick with me.

Work Won’t Love You Back by Sarah Jaffe
Published: January 25, 2021
Bold Type Books
I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Sarah Jaffe is a Type Media Center reporting fellow and an independent journalist covering the politics of power, from the workplace to the streets. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, the Guardian, the Washington Post, The New Republic, the Atlantic, and many other publications. She is the co-host, with Michelle Chen, of Dissent magazine’s Belabored podcast, and a columnist at The Progressive and New Labor Forum.

“We’re supposed to work for the love of it, and how dare we ask questions about the way our work is making other people rich while we struggle to pay rent and barely see our friends.”

This book was a lot deeper than I anticipated. When I applied for this book, I thought I was getting a book about how we have an impossible work-life balance and how many of us choose to work over home more than we should. Boy, was I wrong.

There is so much information in this book. I had to read it in several sittings, and I read three books during this book. I had to break the facts up and give my brain a break. The facts and statistics in this book are eye-opening and terrifying.

The first thing you are going to learn is that Sarah Jaffe is smart. Smart. She is knowledgeable, insightful, and driven. She has done her research. This is not a quick and easy read. This book is heavy. It’s deep. It’s dense. It is filled with facts and personal testimonials, and stories from those who have experienced things.

This book is intense and brutally eye-opening. The way work is defined forever been changed for me. I will never find any job simple or basic. And I will forever think of the paths that lead to a specific position.

This book breaks things down, by number, by race, by gender, by position in such a way that it made my brain hurt. I had no idea. This book will not only make you infinitely more aware of your privilege, but it will also make you smarter for knowing the journey it took to get to where we are today.

This book stats straight up facts regarding how women are treated in the workforce—starting from the beginning. This book breaks down how women of color paved the way and fought for every bit of success they earned.

This book is a must-read. We should all be informed. We should know these things, these statistics. We should know how work is truly defined, and we should recognize every aspect of work. This book was dense but so beautifully written. Sarah Jaffe did her homework, and she delivered her findings in such a powerful way. I learned so much from reading this book, and I feel like I am better for it. This book will be on my recommendation list for sure.

Work Won't Love You Back felt like it could have been so much more. While the first half of the book was cohesive and interesting, the second half felt much less so.

The book is divided in two parts and I am not sure what happened, but I felt like my interest completely dropped off in the second half. I found it to be incredibly boring, but for the chapter on technology. The segments on art, academia, and sports put me to sleep. That being said, the first half was great and I found all of the research and personal stories surrounding family work and domestic work to be of particular interest.

Jaffe touched on topics from witch hunts to family actors in Japan to white supremacist nationalist groups, but only wrote a few sentences about each. The rest of the chapters followed a formula of Personal Story in Indusry + History of Industry Since Dawn of Time + Little Bit More Personal Story That Doesn't Really Wrap Things Up. The book overall felt too broad and I questioned at the end what the purpose of it being written was. It could basically be summed up as “everyone is miserable working, we should love each other and enjoy our lives… Join a union? I guess.” I felt that giving the same spin on every single industry was just excessive and felt like beating a dead horse.

In conclusion, jobs are crap and we are all miserable. 2.5, rounding down to a 2.

Work Won't Love You Back is a timely absolutely vital addition to the discussion on late stage capitalism and its discontents. It is a blend of the personal stories of individuals working in the caring and service industries, and a glimpse into the history of those same industries. It breaks down the "how we got there" with labor history, and points the way toward new ways of pushing back against the predominant narratives of work we find ourselves in today, by outlining the stories of those currently pushing back. It is a much need balm to the dangerous tendency, especially of millennials, to put more of themselves into work than we get out, "doing more with less," as a badge of honor, rather than a mark of the absolute shambles our economy is in. It also questions whether institutions, like NGOs are even able to do the necessary work of change when they are subject to the same forces that cause the problems they are combatting in the first place. If such a large chunk of time is spent on fundraising and playing the game with an eye to said fundraising, is it even possible to do the radical work needed to fundamentally change our society in a way that eliminates poverty, etc.?

In a time when everything is being subsumed by capital, and love is no exception, this book is vital. I would recommend this for anyone interested in labor history, criticism of our current capitalisms, and especially anyone in a caring/service industry. It's important that we challenge the assumptions that lead to the exploitation of workers, especially the harnessing and abuse of carers' desires to help people and do good.

Read if you: Want a thoughtful exploration of modern workplace issues, as illustrated by profiles from a variety of workers, from a nanny to a professional athlete.

Librarians/booksellers; Purchase if there is interest in contemporary work issues; this references COVID-19 issues, so it is quite contemporary.

Many thanks to Perseus Books/PublicAffairs and NetGalley for a digital review copy in exchange for an honest review.

An intense deep dive into our ideas and ideals about work in a capitalist society. It's frankly rather brutal to read at times, but also deeply important. It's also rather surreal to read about her studies into how work and the pandemic play out in almost real time to underscore the need for a different way of thinking about work that matters. She gives reasonable arguments for a universal basic income and insightful stories of individuals who bear the brunt of the exploitative labor, such as domestic workers and teachers in public schools. I did howl out loud at her quote from the Harvard Business Review about the popular work app "Task Rabbit": basically these apps are the "Internet of 'Stuff Your Mom Won't Do For You Anymore''. (Pretty much, brah.)
Overall, this is quite the deep dive into a variety of professions that won't just not love you--they exploit you. Or, more accurately for Jaffe, the capitalistic society that created those professions and meters out the paychecks are actually the ones who exploit us.

The first half of this book was absolutely riveting. The second half was...not as riveting.

I don't know if it's because the author REALLY had a clear thesis in the first half of the book (and the academia chapter, actually), but lost the thread a bit in the second half or what.

That said, this is a good book about the exploitation of all different kinds of labor, and how we got here.

Thanks to the publisher and to NetGalley for the ARC!