Bookshelf (Part Two): Work Won't Love You Back
How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone
The Ars Pandemonium Bookshelf
Thoughts and musings on mainstream business literature through my own prism of managing and leading teams of creative professionals. These are not “book reviews!” See more here.
Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone
Sarah Jaffe; 2021, Bold Type Books
This is the second part of my Bookshelf entry about one of the most electrifying, confounding books I’ve read in years, Work Won’t Love You Back.
“The romantic attachment of the artist to his work is the counterpart of the familial love women are supposed to have for caring work, and these two halves together make up the labor-of-love narrative that shapes our perception of work today.”
In Part One of this writeup I promised, among other things, a deeper dive into quotes and citations from the dense, obsessively researched text.
As it happens, though, Part One hasn’t really lit the world on fire: it’s one of my least read and engaged-with posts.
That’s okay! I write all of this as much for myself as for any imagined audience.
So, while I’m still here publishing Part Two — the book really does live that indefatigably rent-free in my head, and I’ve got things to say about it — deep textual analysis is a lot of work, and doesn’t seem worth it in this venue.
So I’m not gonna do it! The book is far from perfect, but I highly recommend it. Go read it and get the text first-hand!
And now, on with my somewhat less than thoroughly glossed commentary. There’s a lot of it.
Work Won’t Love You Back is structured as a series of ten chapters which discuss different types of work and how they fit into the larger story of our current “labor of love” culture.
Each chapter is built using a similar framing device: we are introduced to an individual somehow involved in that type of work and either currently facing some of the issues/problems in it, or reflecting upon how those issues/problems have affected them.
It’s a straightforward-seeming structure that nonetheless is very artfully conceived and cleverly executed.1 A lot of the material in the book is pretty dry; this sort of frame contextualizes and personalizes it to a surprising degree.
Except when it really doesn’t. But we’ll get to that.
Anyway, an Intro and Conclusion sandwich these chapters. In the Conclusion, Jaffe sums up some characteristics of the various individuals used in these frames:
“The workers you have met over the course of this book have all fought, in one way or another, to have their work recognized and valued as work. For them, it has mattered to be seen and understood as doing something not purely out of selfless (or for that matter selfish) love. They were not amateurs, hobbyists, or members of a ‘family.’ They might have chosen a field that required years of training or sacrifice, or they might have just filled out an application on a whim, but they all understood somewhere along the line that their choices were not limitless, that they could not just expect to be paid for whatever they wanted to do, that even within their labors of love, they were making money for someone else, and they were doing it to get by.”
I love this. It also, in a way, describes the ethos of Ars Pandemonium. I have long struggled with — but also reveled in! — the tension between getting to do what I love for a living, even while having to fit what I love into a structure designed to satisfy someone else’s rapacious need to amass capital. And as a manager and leader, I’ve tried to always recognize this tension in the work and lives of my team.
Still, though, the Ars Pandemonium Bookshelf is nominally a place to talk about “business and management literature.” I’m not entirely convinced this book fits that description. It’s a bit more like “anti-business literature” or “down-with-management literature.”
Maybe that’s why it hasn’t been popular on the channel? Huh.
It’s also part of what I love about it, though. That ambivalence of mine about professionalizing creativity is deep — what I’ve done with my entire adult life, and been very good at, can be a deeply infelicific affair, for sure.2
Ultimately, this book does a great job putting into words many of the problematic thoughts I’ve had about the enterprise over the years. As I wrote in Part One, the book came along at an opportune time for me: I was ready.
And it has helped me understand aspects of my own mindset that I may have known about, but took for granted. Look, for sure the book swings the pendulum pretty far in one particular direction, unsubtly and unashamedly, but sometimes resetting perspective requires that kind of brute force!
I have not come away convinced by everything in the book, or somehow radically changed, but it definitely broadened my outlook.
“The intern is not defined by the kind of work she does, but by her status in the workplace. She can be a law student…an assistant on a film set…a young journalist…an Ivy League student putting in time at an investment bank. She might be paid, but probably isn’t.”
An example of a perspective-jostler for me: Jaffe offers a particularly critical analysis of internships, at least as they are often used today in the white-collar workplace. She refers to interning as, quoting scholars Kathleen Kuehn and Thomas F. Corrigan, “hope labor.”
“Hope labor is a snake eating its own tail, and the intern is the hope laborer par excellence. Working for free in order to one day get one of those jobs that are worth loving, the intern is the vehicle by which the conditions of contingency and subordination that are common to low-wage service work creep into an increasing number of salaried fields. Justified by the meritocratic myth that the best interns will get jobs, the internship actually drives down wages by introducing a new wage floor — free — into the system, allowing companies to substitute interns for entry-level workers. The interns replace the very employees they hope to be.”
As with many things in this book, that conclusion mostly makes up for what it lacks in nuance and complexity with a refreshingly confident calling out of what otherwise might be invisible systematic labor exploitation.
Or in any event, I found it interesting and clarifying: a somewhat more developed structure on which to hang my own thoughts about internship, which have swung between poles several times.
“[Adam Smith wrote that] ‘the sweets of labour consist altogether in the recompense of labour.’”
I remember in college I had a dream of getting work at a recording studio; I called a few people, and the general sense was that I would need to intern, for free, for 40-60 hours a week to get in the door. That was a complete non-starter for me, since I needed to…you know, pay rent and eat. Also, I thought it was bullshit and had no intention of giving my time away.
In the music industry there is (or anyway, there was 30+ years ago) this romanticized notion of the scrappy gofer who empties ashtrays and cleans toilets and then works their way up to eventually being an engineer, producer, artist, etc. My perceived need for housing and food just meant that I was weak — that I must not have wanted it badly enough, that I just wasn’t ready to make the necessary sacrifices.
Maybe that’s an effective mechanism to filter out the dilettantes…but it all seemed, even at the time, toxic as hell to me. I didn’t pursue it.
To be clear, though, I was not (and still am not!) so entitled as to think I should have been able to just waltz in at some leadership level or something. I was (and remain!) happy to start at the bottom and work my way up. I just wasn’t (and still am not!) happy to quite so unambiguously exploit myself. And I’ve tried hard to not perpetuate this kind of practice.
For example, over the years I’ve been involved on the administration side of a number of intern programs that I think did a lot of good for a lot of folks. It’s worth noting that they were always paid internships, but they certainly weren’t well paid, and neither did they do anything to guarantee any sort of future engagement.
But on the ground, as it were, they did offer real-world experience, the chance to try a job on for size, and exposure to professionals in a professional environment that simply would never be available academically.
Could those programs have been exploitative? Sure. Were they? I don’t think so.
Those of us involved in the design and implementation of the programs tried to make them valuable for the interns, but it’s not hard to see how they might have been viewed differently from a different perspective. If the book didn’t convince me that internships are an unalloyed negative, it did make me think just a bit deeper about them.
Jaffe also presents an interesting take on “burnout” and how it applies to work that we ostensibly “love.” I’ve dealt with burnout a lot over the years, in myself and on my teams, too.
It can be a bit of an inscrutable problem: how is it that I can be so spent doing what I want to be doing? And why doesn’t a little vacation clear this feeling up?
Jaffe spends some time on this, interestingly — though hardly surprisingly! — in the chapters on nonprofit work and game development, specifically.
I thought this was a particularly trenchant observation given the thesis of the book:
“The World Health Organization characterizes burnout as ‘feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and reduced professional efficacy.’ Such a definition, of course, assumes that one had a mental connection to one’s job and positive feelings about it to begin with; only the ‘exhaustion’ part applies equally to all workers. Burnout, in other words, is a problem of the age of the labor of love. [Workers are expected] to give their lives over to the work because they believe in the cause; but it becomes harder and harder to believe in the cause when the cause is the thing mistreating you.”
That’s a simple sentiment that feels like it wraps up a very complex relationship in a pretty satisfying way.
“The reality is that the work — like most creative work, ruthlessly romanticized — is a slog.”
In any event, the section of the book that promised the most insight for me was also the one I had the most trouble with (which was probably predictable, I suppose; but look, hope springs eternal, right?). That would be Chapter 9: Playbor of Love, about technology, and specifically, game development.
I get it: my critique of this chapter is going to have trouble not coming off as either petty and defensive, or like a “back-in-my-day” old man shaking his fists at the clouds. Or maybe both!
But here we go.
The author Michael Crichton coined the term Gell-Mann Amnesia effect (with a bit of a wink in the name), and described it as:
“The phenomenon of experts reading articles within their fields of expertise and finding them to be error-ridden and full of misunderstanding, but seemingly forgetting those experiences when reading articles in the same publications written on topics outside of their fields of expertise, which they believe to be credible.”
Oh how I experienced this effect when the book got here to Chapter 9!
Now, it’s not that I read the chapter and thought, this is all wrong. But rather, it frustratingly seemed to miss fundamental industry forces, real-life team dynamics, and any kind of depth of understanding of why the industry is the way it is.
For example, there are maybe a dozen places in this chapter where motivation is ascribed to behavior in a surprisingly shallow way.3 Is that true of the other chapters too? Probably! Gell-Mann Amnesia!
It’s reasonable to suspect my own skewed, overly-personal opinions color my reaction to this chapter. But I also think that it’s fair to say this feels less thoroughly researched than some of the others.
It’s not all bad, of course. For example, here’s a tidy demonstration of how the structure of the book can pay off. In Part One of my writeup I cited some of the interesting research into how the world of “bohemian art” had imbued modern ideas about professional creative work.
Those quotes were from Chapter 6; here we are in Chapter 9, and some of those chickens come home to roost:
“During [the first ‘dot-com boom’], sociologist Andrew Ross was studying the workers of New York’s ‘Silicon Alley’ to understand these new workplace trends, which he dubbed ‘no-collar.’ In the brave New Economy, workers embraced a certain antiauthoritarian perspective, trading in the old status markers of power suits and briefcases for hoodies and T-shirts. The workers adopted the work styles of the bohemian artist, bringing their expectations of creative labor to their new jobs in tech. They also brought a willingness to work in lousier environments in return for deferred financial gain (stock options, in many cases) as long as the work itself was stimulating, creative, ‘work you just couldn’t help doing.’ Ross dubbed this phenomenon the ‘industrialization of bohemia.’”
I love how subtly this is done, flying the bohemian ethos right back in and nesting it down, but not hanging a lantern on it or anything. This structure is well conceived, well written, and well edited. I also like this passage because it’s rather lighter on the judginess.4
But back to the critique. I could dive into specific complaints about, say, the author’s lionization of the SAG-AFTRA video game contract strike (it was more painful and less effective than suggested here), or the laughable absurdity of the organized game workers at the end of the chapter just being exploited by the union itself to further its own causes (this is even mentioned and then…just dismissed?). But this would all get really wonky, really quickly.
I harbor some skepticism of Jaffe’s apparent insistence that unionizing is the solution to all labor problems, it’s true — I mentioned my somewhat equivocal relationship with labor organization in Part One.
Nonetheless, I also recognize that right now the industry is suffering paroxysms of layoffs and other shitty, exploitative behavior and I don’t need to make that worse by even seeming to argue against workers rights (even though I don’t think that’s what I’d be doing). So, I’ll skip the details for now.
But how about this for a general critique: the very conflation of the “game” and “tech” industries seems to demonstrate to me either an almost irresponsible expedience or a naive ignorance, and neither is good!
Here’s the reality: I don’t really know anything about the care-giving industry, nor really that much about retail or sports or several of the other case-study subjects in the book.
I do feel like I know a little about professional art, about teaching and academia, and about nonprofits — though I haven’t worked extensively in any of these fields, people very close to me have, and I feel like I’ve had a bit of visibility into them. And the book’s assertions around these subjects rang generally true to me as I read, and felt insightful (if, again, pretty agenda-driven). I didn’t sense anywhere near the dissonance I did in Chapter 9.
But I spent 23 years working directly in the game industry, and another half-dozen with games as a key part of my portfolio of work in the tech industry. My experience is only my own of course — it’s by nature anecdotal, and as we know, the plural of anecdote is not data.
Still, on this subject, I have a lot of that anecdotal experience. Much, much more, it turns out, than the primary subject — the framing individual — of this chapter.
The chapter begins, as they all do, using an individual’s story to frame it up.5 While this person’s story feels representative enough at first, by the end of the chapter we’ve learned that, big surprise, they’re a union organizer in the game industry.6
What we don’t learn is much about this person’s professional experience, other than a vague sense that they have felt exploited. Well, it turns out this person is easy to find on LinkedIn, and looking at that experience, it’s hard not to come away thinking that this is a very odd person to use as a representative of an entire industry and its labor practices.
They’ve had a very short tenure in the industry, and a very small list of projects. They have not apparently had any kind of leadership positions or decision-making responsibilities, but neither are they a grizzled contributor with broad understanding of industry dynamics.
To be sure, they seem smart and thoughtful, and I’m not trying to suggest that their observations are wrong. They just seem significantly lacking in perspective. I question their credibility to speak on behalf of industry dynamics given what it’s even possible for them to have seen and/or experienced in their time in industry, where they’ve worked, and the projects they’ve shipped.
I am not critiquing the individual! More power to them! I hope their quest is successful! But I am critiquing the author. This whole thing is a stretch.
The video game industry is — or at least, can be — a terribly exploitative industry. And I’d love to believe that this new generation coming up now has a better answer. Good for them! But this chapter did not do a very effective job of convincing me that this is it.
<Deep breath.> I am quite conscious of the fact that I am no kind of impartial observer here. How could I be? But one last note on Chapter 9 to maybe help explain my reaction to it. The chapter ends like this:
“The workers at game companies, and in the broader tech industry, were finally starting to understand themselves not as lucky to have a dream job, but as workers who are producing something of value for companies that rake in profits.”
I mean…give me a fucking break. That’s pretty condescending, isn’t it? “Finally starting to understand” the value of the work?
The implication that all of us who had come before were too blind or ineffectual to see or change the situation is patronizing and belittling at best.
And even worse is the utter lack of recognition that maybe we did see it, maybe we did struggle — with it and against it — and, maybe, we actually made informed decisions given the realistic options available to us. Sigh.
I guess I’m just being defensive (I mean, obviously I am!), but that’s how it goes. Jaffe should have interviewed me for the book! Get off my lawn.
“Sports, like art, is a near universal human habit that has been commodified and turned into a multibillion-dollar industry. It is also a lens through which we can see what — and who — we value as a society. Sports tell us much about whose bodies and lives we think matter.”
The sub-titles (the subjects, as it were) of the ten chapters are, in order: Family, Domestic Work, Teaching, Retail, Nonprofits, Art, Interns, Academia, Technology, Sports.
Especially when one understands the project of the book to be founded in a kind of feminist critique of late-stage capitalism, it’s quite sensical to build the argument from the modern, Western “nuclear family” structure, on through care-giving, teaching, mission-driven work, and so forth.
Applying different lenses (history, cultural anthropology, economics, social science, etc.) to the development of each of these helps form an understanding of where we are, and how we got here. Until those last two, the logic of the order seemed pretty clear to me.
But I thought it was a curious choice to end the book with the chapter on sports, while the technology chapter was second-to-last. Upon first consideration, I would have thought that tech would best finish things up, being a subject particularly useful for a cast-into-the-future kind of summation.
It turns out, that’s not what Jaffe was after.
You see, the business of sports (across professional leagues as well as “amateur” sports like those administered by the NCAA) has a unique ability to bring together issues of ownership/management/labor-relations intertwined with gender discrimination and racial inequity of the creepiest sort.
In the tech industry chapter Jaffe can cite stats like, “a 2019 study found that only 19 percent of the workforce was female, while a slightly better 32 percent identified as something other than white.” That’s rough and identifies an obvious problem. But it sure as hell feels anodyne compared to something like this, regarding the “limbo status” that “student-athletes” face:
“Particularly for Black athletes, this peculiar status brings with it strange working conditions, at times reminiscent, in the workers’ own words, of the plantation. A mix of paternalistic concern and scorn colors the way coaches and administrators talk about and to student athletes, wrote sociologist Erin Hatton. ‘In particular, they are said to need protection from two sources of possible corruption: their own poor choices and commercial exploitation.’ One former football player told Hatton that when he played in the All-Star game, ‘I had a guy that elevated me mentally as soon as I got there. Then, I walk in…, they tell me to strip down to my underwear…I got guys checking body fat percentage on me, guys looking me up and down, [asking] my height, my weight. And, if you think about it, back in the 1800s when they had the slave trade…that was the same thing they did when they were auctioning people off.’”
Holy shit.
My own lack of knowledge of, and indeed interest in, sports showed just as clearly as my rather over-personalized take on the tech and game industries. In fact, ending with the athletic industry makes a lot of sense; poignant, heartbreaking sense.
Despite my rantings about the one chapter, I still really liked this book. Or maybe “liked” is the wrong word — I really appreciated this book, and I feel like I got a tremendous amount out of it. I’m glad to have read it.
One final praise to sing, just about the book itself. In other Bookshelf entries I’ve (strongly) criticized the modern style of not including any footnotes or endnotes within the text. Many books now just gather citations at the end of the book and reference them by a little partial bit of the sentence being supported. It’s an awful practice: as you’re reading, you don’t even know what things have citations at all! Terrible.
Well, Work Won’t Love You Back says, nay! Endnotes abound! Why is that so hard? Love it.
That said, the chapters are also split into Part One and Part Two, five in each. The reason for this split isn’t particularly clear to me and I don’t think it is effective, or even meaningful at all. It isn’t a problem, but neither would the book suffer for its exclusion.
Yeah, yeah. I know all the essay writing tutorials say “be clear, not clever.” Fine. But infelicific is a freakin’ rad word, and I just learned it — and now you did too! Unless you already knew it, which is even cooler! Now we’re both cool!
Ascribing motivation to behavior is a perilous enterprise. That’s the subject of an upcoming essay! Also probably a t-shirt to be available soon — no, seriously.
Were there fools who made bad bets on compensation through stock options? Sure! (Ask me how I know.) But there were plenty of others who ended up nicely rewarded, and along the way did work that was “stimulating” and “creative.” There’s worse things.
I want to note that Jaffe references this individual — and their employer — by name. I’m going to anonymize those here…for obvious reasons. The reality is that this individual didn’t sign up to be in my newsletter/blog thing, so I won’t put them here.
And also they’re in the UK! The UK location isn’t exotic, but since the meat of the chapter takes place in Silicon Valley and Cambridge, MA, it seems like a long way to go to find someone to tell the framing story. None of which is even to mention the differences in labor relations between the US and UK. It just feels…off.