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The first job I ever had was peddling $2.50 slices of pepperoni pizza to rowdy concertgoers and other summer festival attendees. I was 14, and it was fun: Pop songs clamored from a distant stage; free slices were endless; my hand occasionally brushed against the fingers of teenage girls. When customers tossed their quarters into the can near the register, we鈥檇 yell, 鈥淭ip in the jar!鈥� and everybody in the booth would cheer. I loved those moments in a way that I did not fully understand. I love the memory of them still.

My boss was a brusque Italian American (on both sides, not just half, like me), originally from Queens, and a neighbor in the residential area of Seattle where I grew up. He was funny and sarcastic and tough and seemed to genuinely like me. I felt that it was a privilege to ride around with him in his rickety green truck, the two of us weaving through the inclines of Capitol Hill or South Lake Union, a cardboard box of cold cheese pizza on the dashboard between us, a wad of dollar bills stuffed into the front pocket of my tomato sauce-stained jeans. 

 I don鈥檛 quite remember when the relationship between us began to change. It might have been when I showed up to work one gray morning and there were hardly any customers at all. Rather than pay me my hourly wage of $7.75 to stand behind an empty counter, he told me to 鈥渂op around for a little while鈥� and come back when there were more customers. When I received a paycheck that paid me for several hours less than the hours I had actually worked, he explained, 鈥淵ou weren鈥檛 working hard enough.鈥� Another time, he quoted me one hourly wage but paid me a lesser rate. These are classic examples of wage theft, but at the time the only thing I understood was that if I wanted to keep working in the pizza booth, I had to play by his rules. 

I worked that job for another five summers. In some strange way, I loved working in the pizza booth. But the pizza booth (to riff on the title of labor journalist Sarah Jaffe鈥檚 new book) did not love me back. My boss was not my friend, and he certainly wasn鈥檛 my family. He was merely a person who held power over me, and his primary allegiance was to his bottom line. As I moved on to other food service jobs鈥攁longside stints as a caregiver for people with disabilities, political canvasser, adjunct community college instructor, and nonprofit administrator, among many other gigs鈥攊t was a lesson that I would learn again and again. Work was a way to make one鈥檚 living, pointedly not a place to find happiness or develop one鈥檚 sense of identity, although it could sometimes be fun or even rewarding.

This attitude toward work, I understood, placed me out of the mainstream, in part because, as Jaffe鈥檚 Work Won鈥檛 Love You Back (Bold Type Books, 2021) demonstrates, it contradicted the cultural messaging that Americans had been fed for the past 40 years. That you should not only do but also love your job is an idea so ubiquitous as to seem incontrovertible. But its genesis, Jaffe shows us, is actually quite new, and its dissemination has been destructive for workers and the working class as a whole.

Jaffe鈥檚 history goes something like this: Capitalism of every era requires a spiritual or material ethic to justify its existence both to the people whose labor it exploits and to anyone else who might object to the inequalities that it produces. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Protestant ethic of work equated labor with Christian virtue. 鈥淥ne worked to be good,鈥� Jaffe writes, 鈥渘ot to be happy.鈥� As capitalism plunged into crisis, however, and more and more workers organized, the Protestant work ethic gave way to what Jaffe calls the 鈥淔ordist bargain.鈥� While work might have been unpleasant, the better wages and benefits made the deal worth taking. You might have even been able to afford to purchase the products you鈥檇 spent all day assembling.

It was only in the 1970s, after a turbulent decade of social unrest that saw capitalism鈥檚 legitimacy threatened on several fronts, that the 鈥淔ordist bargain鈥� began to break down. This was the moment when workers began to be told that they should love their work. Jaffe again traces this development to a shift in capitalism. As industrialists began to export factory jobs, which were mostly worked by men, to poorer countries, new opportunities for American workers arose in industries like retail, health care, education, and food service, where the jobs were mostly worked by women, the wages were lower, and employment status was more precarious. These new capitalists absorbed earlier critiques of work and used them to their advantage. You say that you find your work boring? Repetitive? Uninspired? Then come work for an employer who cares. Find a profession that you enjoy. Do what you love.

The problem is not only that many, if not most, jobs are not in fact lovable. It鈥檚 also that these directives diminish the potential for collective action. 鈥淚f workers have a one-on-one relationship with the job,鈥� Jaffe writes, 鈥渢hen the solution for its failure to love you back is to move on or try harder. It is not to organize with your co-workers to demand better.鈥� Since 1980, the percentage of unionized workers in the United States has fallen by more than half. During that same time, wages have stagnated, health care and other essential costs have skyrocketed, and wealth has been redistributed to the very top. Jaffe鈥檚 book is filled with the stories of workers in occupations either of 鈥渃are鈥� or 鈥渃reativity鈥� (鈥渢he two halves of the labor-of-love ethic鈥�) who have grown disillusioned by the conditions of their work as well as the arguments used to justify them. Instead of internalizing these failures as personal, they have banded together with the people around them to demand positive change. This is real love expressed in the form of worker solidarity. 

My own story is not so different from some of the people in Jaffe鈥檚 book. After years of low-paid service work, I entered the world of organized labor. I am now employed by a union helping non-union workers to organize. It鈥檚 a great job for me, and I feel lucky to have it. But I wouldn鈥檛 say I love it. Even a job devoted to making other people鈥檚 jobs better is still, in the end, a job. 

What do I love? My family, my friends, my comrades, and the other people with whom I make community. 鈥淲ork will never love us back,鈥� Jaffe writes. 鈥淏ut other people will.鈥�