Work Won't Love You Back, with Sarah Jaffe

Getting to the Root of it with Venus Roots

In this episode, Niki interviews Sarah Jaffe, labor journalist and author. The two discuss Sarah's new book, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted and Alone, which offers historical context on the gendered, racialized, and capitalist history impacting workers, families, and what kind of labor society deems as valuable or not. In this conversation, the two also discuss recent examples of workers resisting, organizing, and shifting the terrain for labor in response to COVID-19 and they challenge the notion that: if you love what you do, you won't work a day in your life.

Sarah's work has been featured in The New York Times, The Nation, the Guardian, the Washington Post, The New Republic, the Atlantic, and elsewhere. She is the co-host, with Michelle Chen, of Dissent magazine’s Belabored podcast, as well as a columnist at The Progressive and New Labor Forum.

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Music courtesy of Magic City Hippies.

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