Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone
Sarah Jaffeamazon.com
Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone
Meanwhile, as if to compensate for an increasingly precarious economy, our fantasies about work have grown, if anything, more intense. Hard work is likely the most universally cherished American value. One recent Pew survey found that 80 percent of Americans describe themselves as “hardworking”—outstripping all other traits. Work has gotten worse, ... See more
The Baffler • The New Neurasthenia
the seeming self-valorization hides high levels of unpaid labor and makes workers acceptant of constantly deferred rewards and total expendability since they can be immediately dismissed if they cease to be “fun,” “sometimes even before a job is finished.”32
Silvia Federici • Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle
Can there be passionate production within capitalist employment that isn’t exploitative? Exploitation doesn’t just exist at the individual level, where individual workers feel exploited in their own jobs. People who are passionate about their work may genuinely not feel exploited. Yet, exploitation in the broader sense is about the reward workers i... See more
The Trouble with Passion
Implicit in the promise of outsourcing and automation and time-saving devices is a freedom to be something other than what we ought to be. The liberation we are offered is a liberation from the very care-driven involvement in the world and in our communities that would render our lives meaningful and satisfying. In other words, the promise of liber... See more
L. M. Sacasas • The Work of Art
The threat of paltry benefits or of losing our homes leaves us vulnerable to worse treatment: we, almost always, need a job more than a job needs us. Our entrance into work is unfree, and while we’re there, our time is not our own.
Amelia Horgan • Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism (Outspoken by Pluto)
There is, and has always been, a curious affinity between wage labor and slavery. This is not just because it was slaves on Caribbean sugar plantations who supplied the quick-energy products that powered much of early wage laborers’ work; not just because most of the scientific management techniques applied in factories in the industrial revolution
... See more