Upstream - Work Won't Love you Back with Sarah Jaffe

Episode Date: July 20, 2021

We’re always told that if you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life. But what if you’re being tricked or manipulated into thinking you love what you do? Or what if your “labor of love” is actually being exploited by someone who stands to gain from your work? What does loving your work actually mean, in a system that is designed to keep you devoted to your job, by any means necessarily? In this conversation we speak with Sarah Jaffe, author of Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone, published by Bold Type Books. Sarah’s book is an examination, and critique, of the labor of love myth — an upstream journey on the nature of work. She reveals how all of us have been tricked into buying into a new tyranny of work, while unpacking why "doing what you love" is a recipe for exploitation, creating a new tyranny of work in which we cheerily acquiesce to doing jobs that take over our lives.  This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. To contribute to our fall seasons crowdfunding campaign, please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support. Thank you. The labor of Lovemith is this idea that we will be motivated to do our work, not because we need to get paid or anything like that, but that we'll do it out of the love of it and that this is actually sort of the best way to be motivated. But like there are a lot of the time when people are being told that we do our jobs for the love of it, really your boss is the one telling you that so they can pay you less, or so that they can expect you to stay longer hours or you know take phone calls on the weekend or whatever it is that they might make a

demand of you. And the idea that this is a labor of love is actually helping them skim more surplus value off of you. You are listening to upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. An interview and documentary series that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Dela Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. In this conversation we speak with Sarah Jaffy, author of Work Won't Love You Back, how devotion to our jobs keeps us exploited, exhausted, and alone, published by bold type books. Sarah's book is an examination of why doing what you love is a

recipe for exploitation, creating a new tyranny of work in which we all cheerily acquiesce into doing jobs that take over our lives. Hi Sarah, welcome to Upstream. We would love to start with an introduction. Would you mind introducing yourself for our listeners? Hi, I'm Sarah Jaffee. I wrote a book called Work Won't Love You Back, How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted and Alone. And I'm a reporting fellow at the Type Media Center and a freelance journalist. Wonderful, thank you.

And really happy to have you. And yeah, I have to say, one of the things that I do is a renegade economist is I'm a right livelihood coach. So I do explore work a lot and just so appreciated your perspective and the research and the history. So please tell us about the book.

Work won't love you back. How devotion to our jobs keeps us exploited, exhausted, and alone. So what is the main message of the book? And why did you write it? Yeah, so I wrote the book because it seemed to me that we had entered a phase of sort of the way we think and talk about work. That is different work ethic than the one we expected to have under sort of mid-century industrial capitalism. Where, you know, if you worked in a factory, you didn't expect the work itself was going to be a whole lot of fun. You expected that you were going to be paid decently and you would get

was going to be a whole lot of fun. You expected that you were going to be paid decently and you would get health insurance in this country, you would get weekends off, you would have a set schedule, you would be able to do things like buy a house and have a decent life. And whether or not you liked the job was sort of beside the point. And we've lost sort of a lot of that security that industrial jobs provided after,

you know, it should be noted several hundred years of union fighting for it. And instead now we're sort of told constantly that we work because we need to find fulfillment. If we don't have a job, we won't have anything meaningful in our lives, and all of this, frankly, kind of garbage, about how work is apparently something that human beings invented to give us meaning, which is definitely not true historically. And so I wanted to look at how this narrative grew and spread, where it comes from, how it's become so pervasive, what has sort of changed about the shape of capitalism that makes this a useful motivating story to tell ourselves and to be told in, you know, 2021. Yeah, thank you. And yeah, one of the quotes from your book is security, where workers spend a

lifetime at one job and then received a pension has been traded for fulfillment. Kind of echoes what you're speaking about. And so central to your book is this idea of the labor of love myth, the labor of love myth. And it's funny because Robert and I at the top of the podcast actually start with upstream as a labor of love. So definitely your book has encouraged me to think differently about that term. So tell us about what the labor of love myth is

and maybe how it manifests in some of the various professions that you explored. Yeah, so the labor of love Myth is this idea, right, that like we will be motivated to do our work, not because we need to get paid or anything like that, but that we'll do it out of the love of it, and that this is actually sort of the best way to be motivated, and that actually if you admit that you are in the job because you need to get paid, there's something like suspect about it, right? We sort of believe that doing the work for the love of it is inherently virtuous. It's not you are in the job because you need to get paid, there's something like suspect about it, right? We sort of believe that doing the work for the love of it is inherently virtuous.

It's not just more pleasurable because we're still sort of not supposed to talk about pleasure, but like it's good. And so the narrative of loving your job, people who are making creative project like you are, right, often say this is a labor of love, which is the implication is that we don't get paid and we're doing it anyway or we don't get paid much, but we're doing it anyway. And you know, that's one thing when you sort of, you know, to be crudely Marxist about it, like control the means of production and you are making a podcast on your spare time. And there's nobody sort of profiting from your labor other than you.

And it's sort of not exploited labor in that way, that's one thing when you sort of control it on your own time. So I write in my journal that we could construe that as work because I am a writer for my job. But nobody checks my journal at the end of the week to make sure I did it every day. If you were doing a podcast for yourself

and nobody, you haven't signed a contract with anybody to produce it, then if you decide tomorrow to stop doing it, you can do that. That's one thing. But when you are making a podcast, for instance, I did a story recently on the Workers at Gimlet, which is a fancy podcast producing company that then recently got bought by Spotify, which is a multi-billion dollar international, whatever, those people in their union contract fight, were fighting in fact for more right to control what they made.

So they didn't have a lot of say over like, if a podcast they made then gets sold for like a TV deal or anything, they were fighting to have not just the money, but some influence over what might happen to the thing that they created. So that's a sort of a different situation. And a lot of the time when people are being told that we do our jobs for the love of it, really, your boss is the one telling you that so they can pay you less, or so that they

can expect you to stay longer hours, or take take phone calls on the weekend or whatever it is that they might make a demand of you and the idea that this is a labor of love is actually helping them skin more surplus value off of you. Yeah, thank you for that and yeah I definitely heard that in many of your stories, I just love how you started with the story of someone in the profession and then went into the history. So there was nonprofits, represented, care work, housework, and internships, art. So you have really, really powerful narrative stories

and then research. And it just sounded like you did a lot of research for the book. I learned a lot about the lot of research for the book. I learned a lot about the history of work from your book. And yeah, one of the things that it reminded me of, one of our latest conversations was actually with Ron Perser, the author of McMindfulness, How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality. And I was reminded of him in your book in terms of the ways that capitalism and especially corporate spaces kind of create these narratives

to keep workers working harder or longer hours or for less pay or with less complaint, so to speak. Yeah, I haven't read that book, but two others that are along the same lines that I was thinking about a lot and referencing in my book are Barbara Aeronite's book, Brightside, of course, and Will Davies' book, The Happiness Industry, both of which sort of trace this narrative around corporate happiness and who profits by us always looking on the Brightside and being cheerful and never complaining and all of that.

And you do clarify, I think it's in the conclusion that, you know, you're not saying we shouldn't love our jobs and you're not saying that, you know, work can't be meaningful. But I'm wondering, you know, what this upstream perspective is about the book. So the title of this podcast is called Upstream about going from the downstream problems such as the exploitation, exhaustion, and sense of aloneness that you describe about our current devotion to jobs. And then when you go upstream from that, what do you see as the root causes? So you kind of touched on that, you know, in this historical view. But I'm wondering what you see as the root causes that kind of connect all of the jobs and the industries that you

looked at. What are the root causes of this of connect all of the jobs and the industries that you looked at. What are the root causes of this problem with work, so to speak? I mean, the problem of work is a problem of somebody is collecting your surplus value and making a profit off of it, right? The problem is capital accumulation. And I sort of quote the French sociologist, some Luke Platonsky and Eve Chappelleau, talking about different areas of capitalism need, their justification, their book is called

the new spirit of capitalism, and they wrote this in the 1990s, talking about again this sort of shift from industrial capitalism to something else, and to an era of sort of networked flexibility. And all of these stories that we hear about this sort of exciting knowledge economy and all of that jazz, which again is mostly garbage because really what we mostly have is a service economy. But in either case, we have something again that's shifted away from industrial work,

where the motivating factor, I mean at the beginning of industrial capitalism, the motivating factor was that you would get whipped and sent to the poor house if you didn't work, and that they had already enclosed all of the commons so you couldn't like, you know, graze your sheep on the commons and, you know, gather food and take care of yourself that way. The sort of means of subsistence existence have been taken away from you, and the power of the state will be brought down on you if you refuse to work in other ways. So there's that. And then, as it goes on, bosses realize

that some level of labor pieces helpful. And so they essentially start signing contracts with unions. And that brings us to the 1970s, the sort of profit crisis. And the way that that gets solved in countries like the US That brings us to the 1970s, the sort of profit crisis. And the way that that gets solved in countries like the US is shutting down the factories here, opening them in places where the wages are lower and the environmental regulations are fewer. And what happens in places, so I was just in Youngstown, Ohio, and last time I was there,

I was there to cover the closing of the famous Lawrence town auto plant. But of course Youngstown has seen a whole lot of closures of various industries. And the thing that fills in the gaps, the jobs that take the place of those industrial jobs, a lot of them are caring jobs. They're health care work, right? Gabriel Wynon's wonderful book that just came out the next shift looks at how this happened specifically in Pittsburgh where, you know, the steel mills close, but health care expands. And so women who had maybe not had a job before outside of the home are now having to go to work because their husband got laid off because the steel mill closed and they are going to take jobs at the hospital but they are getting paid less than the unionized job at the steel mill paid.

Because we had a history of thinking women's labor isn't worth much because it's done for free in the home. And so this entire shift from masculine industrial labor that is not expected. Your feelings about it are irrelevant, basically. You can cry standing on the assembly line, you can laugh standing on the assembly line, according to most of the workers I've talked to, if you have too much fun, the boss yells at you. But it doesn't really matter how you feel about it.

To a job that very much matters how you feel about it, or at least it matters how well you can pretend and mask how you feel about it to a job that very much matters how you feel about it or at least it matters how well you can pretend and mask how you feel about it. If you are a nurse or a nursing assistant in a hospital and you go into a patient's room and the patient throws something at you, you still have to take care of them and you still have to, you know, be able to, I'm doing this gesture while we're recording audio, like, pasting on a smile on your face in order to get through the day. If you're working in a restaurant and your customer grabs your ass, which has happened to me when I was working in restaurants,

you are probably making tips. And so you probably still have to be nice to that person. All of these parts of the self, essentially, that we fewer people had to bring to the job, these are now the dominant jobs in our economy. And right now, we're going through this thing where people are freaking out about workers not wanting to go back into the service industry in a pandemic, which is not over. And everybody's, oh, the unemployment benefits are too high. We have to lower the unemployment benefits to force people back to work.

Well, A, I made this meme from the movie Mean Girls where I don't, describing memes on audio never works, but essentially where, you know, the one person says, if we give people money, then they won't go to work. And the other one says, so you agree that people only work under capitalism because if they didn't, they'd starve. You know, the obviousness of like, we're gonna take away your unemployment benefit so that you go take shitty restaurant jobs because your unemployment benefits got taken away. Well, you kind of have admitted that like people actually don't do restaurant work because they love it. They do it because it's easily accessible. We think of it as

unskilled labor. It is very skilled labor and they don't want to raise the wage which I learned in economics 101 was what happens if you can't get people to work in your business for the wage you're offering learned in economics 101, was what happens if you can't get people to work in your business for the wage you're offering, then you have to offer them more money. But instead, they're going to pressure the state to cut away unemployment benefits. Anyway, this is a tangent. But the way that we understand and the sort of the obviousness right now of the fact that like the wage relation is coercive, the pandemic has made that much more obvious. And this whole debate over unemployment insurance and whether it should be taken away from people to force them to go back to taking jobs, it's revealing how much this whole story about

loving your job and doing it because you love it is a lie. And to take another area of the pandemic, I saw a graph recently, it was carbon emissions. And it was kind of a jagged line kind of going up and up and up and then the person presenting the graph said, oh, and here's COVID. And it was really a barely a dip, very, very tiny before it then started jaggiving upwards again. And in your book, one of the things that you speak about, it's something like you say, considering climate change and kind of speaking about carbon intensity, how much work can we afford?

And I just, I thought that question was such a powerful question right now in terms of where we are in the pandemic. And so I'm wondering when you consider that from where you are and what you've looked at and the research you've done, what would you recommend that we do or that we invite to change or demand to change the economic systems in terms of work for that ecological impact piece. Yeah, so some friends of mine who run a think tank called Autonomy in the UK actually put out a paper a couple of years ago now that actually looked at what length of a work day we would need in order to get to the carbon emissions level we need. I don't remember, I mean it was in the UK, so like the headline number was that the UK should have a nine-hour work week. And I made a big splash with that when it was on the cover of a couple of tablets, like, we should work only nine hours a week to save the planet. And I'm like, that sounds great.

And obviously, like, the reality is that like some jobs are more carbon-intensive than others. There is also like things like Bitcoin mining that are just absolutely destroying the planet for no good reason to make speculative assets for the wealthy, but we can talk about blockchain and whatever another time. But the way that like we talk about green jobs as if green jobs are going to be like installing solar panels and retrofitting homes and you know installing infrastructure for electric cars or whatever. And not that green jobs are also being a teacher. Is a green job, right?

Working in healthcare is a green job. These are environmentally friendly jobs that are going to need to continue to exist. So I think that the discourse around essential work in the pandemic, the problem with it was that the boss got to decide most of the time whether you were essential or not. But it does give us a window into thinking about like, okay, what work is actually essential? What is the work that actually needs to be done

in order for us to continue to exist as a species? And as a society, and how do we value that? So it's not just like we should all work less, although it's fun to say that we should all have a nine hour work week for the climate. I'm into that. But also that the work that is done, we need to think really hard about like, is this essential? Is all of the production of junk that we can buy at Walmart or on Amazon necessary?

And like a lot of the workers themselves are talking about this. So I remember one of the times that Amazon warehouse workers had a walk out during the early months of the pandemic. They were talking about like they're like, look, we don't mind coming to work to get people things that they need. But this guy's like, I had to pack a rubber chicken the other day. You don't need a rubber chicken. You know, it's like packing rubber chickens is not essential labor. And those kinds of conversations that are actually being led by people who are doing the work, I think those are really interesting. Another one that I always bring up is workers at a GE plant that makes military aircraft

had a protest and they said we want to make ventilators. Again, if you're going to make us keep coming to work in this moment, we don't mind, but we want to make something necessary. We want to make something essential. We want to make something that actually like has the potential of saving lives rather than taking them. So these questions, I think, are really, really interesting and necessary necessary to keep asking and to have as sort of a big broad, messy public conversation that figures out what we actually need and what kind of garbage is being produced so that Jeff Bezos can become the world's first trillionaire. Yeah, so that's kind of the ecological angle and you're also speaking about the workers themselves

making those decisions, or at least the input as to what that essential work is right now. So this leads to unions, which just so many of the stories that you share in the book are connected with unions, and so much of the history is the history of labor organizing. And wondering, when you think about the social recommendations that you might have, you know, in terms of unions, also worker cooperatives. Also, I was very surprised, I guess I never thought about it, that there are unions within nonprofits. I don't know why I thought that was only for-profit institutions.

So that was really informative to learn about that. And of course, many nonprofits can mimic the top down and the power structures of capitalist organizations or institutions. So that was really interesting. But yeah, so I'm thinking about unions, worker cooperatives, also worker self-directed nonprofits. I wonder if you can speak about that and how that is the opposite of the main point about how work keeps us exploited, exhausted alone, or if you have any other recommendations that you'd have for folks to explore. Well, I mean, so the things that we're talking about here, unions in particular, but also worker cooperatives, the thread that runs through all of those is that the people who

are doing the work get to decide. So back to the beginning where you talked about your podcast being a labor of love, right? Like part of that can be that you don't have a boss. And again, so you have the choice to say that. So if you're a worker cooperative and you're like, say the cooperatively-owned coffee shop that I was in the other day, then the people who work there democratically decide what their hours are gonna be

and who's gonna work what shifts and what kind of coffee they're gonna stock and's going to be on the menu and all of these decisions that need to get made in the workplace get made democratically and you still might Work-long hours and you still might not make a lot of money a lot of cooperatives do not make a lot of money because they're driven often by something other than just pure profit calculations, right? So workers rarely vote to work as hard as they are forced to work in an Amazon warehouse. They rarely vote for a

12-hour overnight shift because that sucks. So those kinds of questions, you know, are questions on some level about like, can you unalienate your labor under capitalism, which is an interesting and messy question to ask? And with unions, you know, it is also the solution to giving workers more power in the workplace and more power to say what the conditions of their labor are gonna be. So there are nurses on strike right now at St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts,

who have been on strike for, I think they're going into their 11th week of being on strike now, and the issue that they're striking over is patient ratios. So it's how many patients each nurse is going to be responsible for on a shift, and they want to lower those patient ratios so they can give better care. And the hospital is willing to continue to fight them on that, which is you would think not that they a deal considering how much they're spending

on replacement nurses and security and all the rest of it. The conditions of their labor are not just how much they get paid, but it's a variety of ways that they see that they could do the job better, because in fact, they do care about the job. And so those kinds of questions are also ones that unions bring to the table, as well as, you know, shorter hours and more money and better benefits. Again, I'm sort of agnostic on the question of whether people should like their jobs or not.

The real thing I think we have to do, as again, as a society, is figure out how to improve work as a society is figure out how to improve work for everyone so that it's not... We're not just making it better for those of us who are lucky enough to get to do jobs that we like, but we're actually making it better for everyone. Whether you are, you know, my first job was cleaning up garbage and not door concert hall. It was not fun. It was minimum wage to pick up trash and scrub vomit from toilets. That was not an enjoyable job, but there are ways to make even that job better, right? And so these are questions that are better answered thinking on that level than on

whether like individual people are going to be happy at their individual jobs. Those are problems that we all try to solve for ourselves, but the way to make them a political question is not sort of what are your life hacks, but it's like how do we politically have more power as workers? And so organizing is the big answer to that question. Yeah, and another example of that space of political questions, when you spoke about, in the book about nonprofits, you spoke about how it can sometimes be seen as a shadow state. And I thought that was so fascinating how, yeah, some kind of commons work and work for providing safety nets is in the realm of nonprofits and kind of relegated to that and that that

really is a political question. So that's another another example of that. So I'm wondering for folks listening who might be in any one of those professions that you speak about in the book, whether it's artists or people in nonprofits, maybe an intern or a student or someone who's a parent or a domestic worker. What kind of questions or invitations might you have for them? What might you want to leave them with and something they could explore or just look at in their own life or their own location?

I mean, I have tons of questions for people because I'm a journalist and it's always fundamentally a little uncomfortable for me to be on this side of the microphone. I prefer to ask the question. But for people to think about, you know, I think the thing I was just saying about the question of like, how do we figure out these things as big broad social political questions and not just like, how do I have better, you know, work-life balance? But how do we understand these? I think about the feminist movements, consciousness raising groups of the 70s, where the line, the personal,

is political. The point of that was actually to understand that we all have similar problems. And they overlap and intertwine in these ways. And maybe we didn't see before and so you know I would ask people to think about like what do you have in common as a teacher with somebody who works in restaurant what do you have in common as a computer programmer with somebody who makes art.

What are the things that we actually share? And what are the problems that we actually share? Like it was really interesting for me that I, you know, the first half of the book is work that is in some ways related to the unpaid work women or expected to do in the home. And so I expected in all of those workplaces for bosses to tell people, we're a family, we're part of the family. I didn't expect to hear it so much from computer

programmers, but they sure do hear it all the time to the point of one company that brands itself as a fan penny, which is a trotious, right? I just thought that word is cursed. But like, the way that that has spread from these sort of feminine gendered jobs where care is part of the work you do to this thing that at least now, when computer programming got started, it was also presumed to be a woman's job. But now it's super masculine, I was right, and this narrative that like the programmer is this, you know, socially awkward male nerd who doesn't like to talk to real humans, that is constructed. But even to those people, the motivating thing that the boss often uses, it we're a family here. So like those things even surprised me when I was reporting on the book.

Your listening to an upstream conversation with Sarah Jaffy will be right back. Here the shimmer of the sharpening blade, Do you feel the thunder from the low, where it's gonna break Right in the new, and they should, I can't wait I'll admit, that you've done pretty well so far Did you think that you were putting up where you are? Do you think that you're a god now in your fancy car? He's screaming like a movie star And I'm like God, how embarrassing for you Oh my God, you really think you built that throne You look down from to sit on everyone Yeah, I'm a great man

I'm a great man I'm a great man I'm a great man I'm a great man You really think you've been thrown you down from To spit on everyone Yeah, your time is gonna run out soon And you couldn't swing a hammer if they paid you too What have you been doing since the world shut down Counting all the cards you stole to build your house Your insidious extraction won't protect you now Cause we're turning on the lights That you've been shivering That was Oh My God by Lula Wiles. Now back to our conversation with Sara

Jaffee, author of Work Won't Love You Back. Okay, so I want to spend the second half of our time focusing on women and work. And I'm wondering if we can start by talking a little bit about how women have been affected by COVID in terms of their employment. So women have been taking the brunt of the COVID work crisis in so many ways, right? One of them is that women are still doing the vast majority of the housework, the childcare, the family care, and friend care responsibilities. And that has remained true even as women are more and more likely to also be in the paid workplace. So what we've seen is COVID sort of broadly split

the workforce into three. There are people who got laid off, no job. There are people who were working from home, doing the same thing that they were already doing, but doing it at home, and then there are people who are still going to the workplace just in worse and more dangerous conditions. So all three of those things suck, right? None of those things are fun. So if you are working from home now, and you are, say you are a married heterosexual couple

with two kids, and the kids cannot go to the school building. So even though they are still going to school, they're doing school on a computer, their teacher is teaching virtually. So you have to do the part of the teacher's job that is making sure your kid doesn't drink bleach or whatever it is that small children get in due during the day. All sorts of trouble. To make sure your kid actually sits at the computer and does their work, you have to do that.

In addition to doing your day job, I'm literally sitting at desk with two computer screens in front of me. So I'm like just during at them while I have this conversation. And you have to do your job from home. And then we saw in studies that people were actually working longer hours when they're working at home during COVID, right? And so you are supervising your kid, which you don't normally have to do,

then also doing your day job, then you're dealing with other family members who might not need your direct supervision, like say a husband, but still expect also labor from you. So what we saw, we saw a lot of women reporting being incredibly incredibly incredibly stressed. We also saw more women leaving the paid workforce. So if there is going to be because women still make less money on average than men for paid work, Again, if you were in that theoretical heterosexual couple, which is not at all really the norm for households anymore,

but that's another digression we could get into. You are probably the lower earner in the family. You were the one who was expected to be responsible for the kids and the care and perhaps you have like an elderly relative you're taking care of. Any of those things. So you are more likely to be the one whose job is going to get the X. Also, because women are concentrated in service professions, and a lot of things that close, restaurants, hotels, all of that, women were more likely

to lose those jobs because they were more likely to be in them in the first place. So the people who are more likely to be able to continue working from home are people who are in professions that have a little bit more status and power, the people who are being forced to still go to the workplace, are in service industries, public-facing industries, healthcare obviously, and those are jobs that women predominate in. And that's also to say like the healthcare jobs, which just got astronomically harder, right? This is also a thing that happened also to say, like, the healthcare jobs, which just got astronomically harder, right? This is also a thing that happened mostly to women.

So another big question. So just however you want to respond, it's totally wonderful. What is the relationship between women and care work? Just like, what's that connection? And then what do we need to know about the history? Like for example, in the book you talk about, women pre-capitalism had access to the commons, and now women are the commons. I thought that was really powerful.

Women as a natural resource. So that type of thing, but then you also wrote about the wages for housework movement. So just however you might tell kind of the journey of quote-unquote women's work or care work over time. Yeah, so the split of women into being responsible for carrying the home, the household, that kind of work goes back a long ways. However, it's not natural. And sort of a lot of people will say, like, oh, well, women are the ones who have babies. So therefore, this is just natural.

And women are naturally good at caring. And that's why they end up in professions like teaching and nursing, home health care, and other things that are slightly more distant from that. But like, you know, food service and retail work, flight attendants, any number of things where we are expected to cater to other people's feelings and needs and desires.

But actually, this has been socially constructed, and it's socially constructed through a whole bunch of violence. So Sylvia Federici and her wonderful book, Caliban and The Witch, writes about this period of transition to capitalism through the lens of the witch hunt, and talks about the way that the witch hunt was actually a way to control both women's bodies, right? To re-instantiate sort of male control of her reproduction, because before we had fancy

DNA tests, you never knew who the father of the kid was necessarily. And so for men to essentially know who to pass their inheritance down to, they needed to control the woman to make sure she wasn't sleeping around. And also to control the woman to make sure that she gives birth to the baby and doesn't do anything like having abortion, which are ancient technologies that women have. So the control of the woman as a sort of resource

is something that gets instantiated through the witch hunt, through, again, massive state-sanctioned violence against women, and against women as women as witches, so as people who control their reproduction, as people who didn't want to work, federAT rights about how magic was a way of getting what one wanted without work. And so burning witches was essentially another way of reinforcing the work ethic, but it was also a way of sort of confining women back into the home. So women before that had access to the commons, so they were responsible for things that were considered labor, and the beginnings of capitalism through this period.

It's a shift to wage labor from sort of subsistence labor. So now men are the ones who go to a workplace to work, even though it was never actually clearly divided like this. There were a lot of women in those early factories and a lot of children in those early factories. But nevertheless, the narrative goes, Women stay home in the home. This is what they're good at. This is what they're for. And men go into the workplace and they make a wage and they bring that home and they support the family. And the man is the head of the household,

the same way that the king is the head of the state. And so all of this structure is, again, it's built onto us through the violence of the witch hunt. It's also achieved through a variety of laws that are put into place around vagrancy, around prostitution, around anything that was not considered sort of productive labor, and gets extremely regulated during this period. And so we end up moving into this work regime that on some level resembles this thing that we were, you know, told was natural, that has completely fallen apart now, right? So now, women are, though a bunch of women have fallen out of the paid workforce during the pandemic,

women are in the paid workforce because those jobs for men have disappeared. Women are doing those jobs that were considered only for a man and have always done them on some level. And so this understanding that certain work is for women, for instance, teaching, right? The creation of public schools in the US, in particular in the US, sort of goes back to, you have some people thinking, oh, we should have public schools, that's going to be expensive. How do we deal with that? Before the sort of standardization of public schools, you had teachers who were young men, who maybe traveled from school to start to school to start to start to start. But men wanted to be paid more. Women, well women, aren't really workers. Women don't need real jobs because women's real job is to be in the home with kids.

So you create this story that women with kids. So you create the story that women are good at taking care of children. Therefore, they'll be naturally good teachers. We don't have to pay them as much because their husband or their father should be the one supporting them. And then they're just magically good at it, right? And we see this narrative continuing through the pandemic where teachers are getting constantly shamed for not marching right back into schools, which should be reopened because everybody needs a school to be reopened because moms are stressed, not, you know, leaving alone the fact that 75% of teachers are women. So a lot of those moms who are stressed are teachers and they're stressed because they're

teaching. But this story about how teachers should be self-sacrificing and caring, and their most important thing they can do is to care about the kids and give up any needs that they have for themselves. This is the thing that's been constructed for us by hundreds of years of capitalism, hundreds of years of frankly violence. And it reminds me how capitalism is supremacy is you know, supremacy over women, supremacy over the ecology, right? So many supremacies baked into it. And one of the shifts that I

had while reading your book was I would have said that I was for child care provided by workplaces or child care allowances or even universal child care. But in reading your book, I kind of realized that's not as radical because it could still lead to white women having the childcare provided by women of color. And whereas it like a universal basic income could allow women who want to be stay-at-home parents, be that. And others who want to still receive that basic income and provide child work they could. So I guess I'm wondering, would universal basic income

be something you would be a proponent of or what would be the answer to care work through what you researched? I mean, the answer to care work is a lot of different things, right? We absolutely need to have universal child care, child allowances, right? Under the first Biden rescue package, we actually got an expansion of the child tax credit that actually is refundable. So for the first time, people are going to get

checks every month, $3,000 a year per kid, which is amazing. It's something that the welfare rights movement in wages for housework have been calling for forever. And in one sort of big rescue package it gets put into place, although it's still not really enough money and it's currently temporary, so we have to fight to keep it permanent. And that is, in a way, right, like it's a kind of a basic income. It's currently only being given per child, so it's being given to people who are parents or caregivers of children, but nevertheless, it is a recognition that childcare is work and that it's work that we as a society have a collective stake in supporting. So I don't have children of my own. I'm actually staying with friends right now

who are about to have their first child and I very much have a stake in their child being happy and healthy because they are my friends and I love them, but also in somebody down the street who I don't know is kid being happy and healthy, right? This is why pay taxes for public schools, and this is why we should also pay taxes to support people having children. And so I think the thing about basic income

is that the way it gets talked about by a certain group of people like my least favorite person Andrea Yang who is running for mayor of New York right now and his actual basic income proposal for New York is terrible. It is neither universal nor basic and that it is not really enough money for anybody to do much of anything with. And it is going to be paid for in his proposal by cutting other social welfare programs. So that's the sort of worst case scenario, something that like somebody like Milton Friedman was in favor of, right, was to essentially get rid

of the social safety net, give everybody a certain amount of money, and that goes away. Just a quick note, since the recording of this conversation, the New York mayoral race has concluded, Eric Adams won the election and Andrew Yang conceded very early on. The thing about a basic income is like my income needs as a single woman who doesn't have children are very different than people who are having children.

And so to actually think about like what do people need to have provided as a baseline? For instance, healthcare, the reason that we talk about having universal public health care is that everybody's health care needs are different. Right now I'm pretty healthy. Next week I could go to the doctor and get diagnosed with cancer. You don't want that to come out of a basic income, because all of a sudden my needs have totally changed. From being somebody who spends very little money on health care other than the money that I'm currently setting on fire,

paying it for a monthly premium to a lousy insurance company, to potentially spending a ton of money on health care. So you need to actually provide for these things in a way that takes into account that people's needs changed drastically, quickly. Johnny Tillman, who is one of the leaders of the welfare rights movement, would say welfare is like a traffic accident It can happen to anyone and that kind of understanding that these systems have to be there for people when their needs change

that things have to be there to Deal with that traffic accident. You know, you can't sort of just give everybody the exact same amount and call it a day. We actually have to build systems that deal with the fact that, again, people have drastically different needs, abilities, desires. So those are some of the questions about basic income. In general, however, I think the government can give us money and it should, and in fact, it has recently and it is continuing to in you know this child tax credit I never got my latest stimulus checks I'm mad about it but we've

seen in recent years right that the government can in fact give us money and I think that's great I think they should give us more. One thing you write about in your book is the Wages for Housework Movement. I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit about that. So the Wages for Housework Movement is something that I really love to talk about. So it's Sylvia Federici, who I was talking about, who wrote the book, Caliban and the Witch, was actually one of the organizers

of the early Wages for Housework Movement, along with people like Sam La James and Mariero Sadella Costa, and they were socialist feminists in the 1960s and 1970s looking at the structures of capitalism that changes that were going on, and the fact that women were still doing the majority of the caring work. And they said rather than that the solution be women all go get paid jobs and the care work will somehow just get shoved off to somebody else, normally another woman. But the solution is actually to recognize

that housework is work, that it is work that by reproducing workers for capitalism actually creates value and is essential in the creation of value. If your husband goes to work in a factory every day and you are the one who keeps the house clean, watches the kids, cooks the dinner, does the shopping, does the laundry, does all of these things so that he doesn't have to do it so that he can spend most of his energy creating value for capital all day long at the factory. You are in fact contributing to that value creation. And what happens through the sort of family wage is that that money is all being paid by the company, right?

So Henry Ford's famous five-dollar a day wage at the Ford factory was based on the worker being a straight man who was married to a woman. And Ford would have inspectors that he would send into your home to make sure that you were having upstanding heterosexual reproductive sex and literally had a whole department for this. And so that family wage is given to the man by the company. And the woman does not actually have any control over that money, she has no power, but none of it is hers. So the call for wages for housework was to understand

that part of this money that is being paid back to them is actually should be paid to women. And so this is an argument and the sort of tension within the wages for housework movement was often whether they really wanted to be paid and continue to do the housework or whether they wanted to be offered a wage in order to refuse the housework by calling it work and rather not a natural part of who women are. This wonderful line in one of the Wages for Housework pieces that says, we want the wage in order to say we are not that work.

We have to understand, and to come back to the sort of fundamental question of care work, one of the things we have to do is de-gender care work, is to say that actually, this is not a natural function of being a woman, that actually, the way we think about the gender binary has screwed up in many, many ways. One of them being that we assume that certain work is naturally attached to a certain chromosome. It's just really weird, right? Like, I don't have children. I'm not particularly good with children. If I was magically naturally

good at this because I'm a woman, my life would look very different. I am not. I have, you know, no men who do care work, I know men who are nurses, who are teachers, who are wonderful with children and love them deeply and are excellent at their jobs. And so, one of the things about the continued sort of devaluing of care work is that it is devalued because it's women's work and women end up doing it because it's devalued and it becomes this vicious cycle that to break that, we have to both value women and value care and point out that those are not the same thing. Let's come back to COVID for a moment.

And as you know, there's many different recommendations for recovery plans to the pandemic. I'm wondering if you were put in charge and you were to offer a feminist economic recovery plan to COVID-19, what might it look like to you? Yeah, I mean, we need to expand and make permanent that child tax credit. We need to really look at how the healthcare work is being done. We need universal healthcare like yesterday.

We need to look at the way we've talked about teachers in this pandemic, the nightmare. All of this kind of caring labor needs to be again, it needs to be revalued, it needs to be de-gendered, it needs to be paid a whole hell of a lot more. And we also just all need some time off. Like, I think one aspect, and this is something that Researcher Janet Gornick has written about that one of the best ways to equalize the amount of work done in the home is to actually make the work week shorter for everyone. Because if you make the work week shorter by choice, the same thing happens that I was talking about before,

which is that women tend to be the lower earners and they end up taking the shorter hours and staying home and doing more of the housework. But if you actually make the work week shorter for everyone, you don't have that exclusive forcing women back out of the workplace, and you can actually rely on a more equitable distribution of the non-waged work. So, you know, we need shorter hours because we're all forget traumatized, but we also need shorter hours because it's one of the ways to equitably distribute the non-waged work. So yeah, my feminist economics program has a

whole bunch of money for caring work jobs to get a whole lot more people into them. And that way the ones who are doing them now can do less work and be less stressed. Those are also green jobs, which is wonderful because a feminist economic program has to be a green economic program. And yeah, and then as I was saying before, we sort of need to do a massive sort of cultural evaluation of the things and junk and garbage that we produce that is killing the planet and produce a lot less of it. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Sarah Jaffy, author of Work Won't Love

You Back, how devotion to our jobs keeps us exploited, exhausted, and alone. Published by Bold Typebooks. Upstream The Music was composed by Robert. Thank you to Lula Wiles for the intermission music. We just launched our fall season crowdfunding campaign. This next season we hope to produce at least three documentaries, including episodes on defunding the police, a people's guide to the Bay Area, and a sharing economy part two, looking at the gig economy landscape five years after our first documentary on the subject. We also plan on releasing dozens of interviews for our in-conversation series.

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