Sarah Jaffe: Work Won’t Love You Back

As we are approaching international workers’ day, come and join Sarah Jaffe as she talks about why Work Won’t Love You Back – a book in which she examines the prevalence of the ‘labour of love’ myth: the idea that certain work is not really work, and should be done for the sake of passion rather than material rewards. Through the lives and experiences of various workers—from the unpaid intern and the overworked teacher, to the nonprofit employee, the domestic worker and even the professional athlete, this talk asks whether we’ve been tricked into a new tyranny of work and proposes some suggestions for how to combat it.

Speaker: Sarah Jaffe is a Type Media Center fellow and an independent journalist covering the politics of power, from the workplace to the streets. The author of Necessary Trouble, she has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation and many other outlets. Her most recent book is Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted and Alone. She tweets as @sarahljaffe.

Chair: Dr Nela Smolovic Jones is a Lecturer in Organisation Studies at The Open University’s Department for People and Organisations. Her research focuses on the interface between gender and democratic practice, especially areas such as feminist solidarity building, democratic organising, equality at the workplace and institutional forms of gendered corruption.

Nela is also the founder and director of the Gendered Organisational Practice (GOP) research cluster, which sits within the REEF academic centre of excellence. The cluster provides a space in which feminists of any gender can share insights and knowledge from academic study and practice. The cluster also includes a gendered working bodies focus, which studies the intersections between material bodies and the workplace, including the difficulties experienced by workers who menstruate, who have gynaecological conditions such as endometriosis, PCOS and PMDD and who are going through the menopause.