Suffering for the Cause: An interview with Work Won’t Love You Back author Sarah Jaffe
You wrote a fantastic book called Work Won’t Love You Back on labor, love, and how work exploits us. Can you share a bit about what drew you to this subject for your writing and this book?
Sarah Jaffe: Thanks! I’ve been a labor reporter for over a decade now, which means that work is my beat. This book is in so many ways a synthesis of that last decade of reporting: on the way work has changed and with it our expectations of what a job should provide for us. I started connecting the dots when I realized that I was hearing similar stories over and over from wildly disparate groups of workers, from fast food workers to nurses to filmmakers and athletes. All of them were expected to love their job or at least to pretend to.
Your book explores the history of the exploitation of workers, organized labor, and their intersection with racism, classism, sexism, and xenophobia. We know that so many of the issues impacting reproductive freedom stem from these oppressions, as well as labor inequity, but so few workers in repro see themselves as part of the labor movement or labor organizing for themselves. Why do you think that is? In the book, you explain the history of nonprofit organizations beginning as charity work done by wealthy non-wage earning white women as a hobby and then describe its transformation into the tax havens for corporations and capitalists we see today, also known as the ‘nonprofit industrial complex.’ The reality is that many of our organizations’ boards and funding sources are still directed by philanthropists who are removed from the lived experiences of the people we serve, our own experiences as workers, and uphold the racist and classist system creating this whole mess. Is this even possible for workers to organize to shift? What, in your opinion, would have to shift?
Sarah Jaffe: This is THE question, isn’t it? It’s actually fascinating to me because from my vantage point, organized labor and the mainstream repro movement suffer from so many of the same problems: an overdependence on the Democratic party and an unwillingness to deal with some of these very issues you mention here. Also, Cecile Richards, the much-lauded former head of Planned Parenthood, got her start as a labor organizer! Yet there’s still this imagined disconnect where labor is for Big Manly Men or something, and repro is where the girls are and somehow isn’t really work--something that, as I note in the book, sometimes leads to really awful working conditions for repro workers, both on the movement side and on the direct service provision side. And this is a problem that I think both sides are a little bit guilty of exacerbating, mostly unintentionally but sometimes, as in the cases of the union busting at some of these Planned Parenthood affiliates, intentionally.
It’s really hard because most people who go into repro work do it because they (you!) believe in the movement, but the reality is that just like everyone who goes to work, ultimately we still work because we need a paycheck. This is as true of nonprofit sector workers as anyone and particularly for people who may be drawn to repro health, rights, and justice work particularly because of their experience at the intersections of multiple forms of oppression, and one of those is definitely in the workplace. We assume that nonprofit jobs will treat us less crappily than the restaurant or retail job might, and then when that turns out not to be true, it can drive people out of the movement entirely. Disillusionment is personally painful but it’s also *bad long term for the movement’s ability to sustain and win.* If you keep burning people out, you lose institutional memory, you lose all sorts of abilities to build on past successes and learn from past failures, and that contributes to the feeling of running in place that I have when I think about both (much of) organized labor and the (mainstream) repro movement.
And particularly in the US, racism is always at the root of these issues, and the unwillingness to grapple with it honestly leads to so many problems. From the racist history of sterilization abuse, eugenics, etc. that led some white women to be interested in “family planning” to the history of medical experimentation on Black and immigrant people, particularly women, these are questions that affect people’s real healthcare and political choices today (we see this with the Covid-19 vaccine as well as with repro decisions!) Ultimately a movement that is directed at the top by people who come from generational wealth means it’s going to be a movement disconnected from the real lives of working class people, who are more likely to be people of color and also to be the people who need the services that repro health groups provide.
“Overworked, burned-out workers are not simply extra-passionate: they are exploited. The system allows rich philanthropists to reap the tax benefits of their charitable giving while maintaining control over their fortunes.”
What we hear from workers in our movement is low pay for so-called “post-college” entry level work on the assumption that entry level and young workers don’t have children and families to care for, college debt, or are impacted by the financial pressures of capitalism. It feels like the modern version of the “family-sustaining wage” which was the wage paid to white men to cover their families but denied to white women workers and workers of color because their families of color weren’t valued and it was assumed white women had a husband’s salary to depend on. Does it feel like we’re replicating the same systems?
Sarah Jaffe: It’s another version of the pin money argument, isn’t it? Young workers, particularly *young women* or femme-presenting people, don’t count as real workers because they don’t really need the money. And in nonprofits it’s particularly shaped by that old idea, again, that the people who go into that work have some other sort of income--family money, a husband, blah blah blah--that they can rely on. But these days that’s just fundamentally untrue and even if it was possible to run your entire movement on the backs of the independently wealthy, *you shouldn’t* because once again, if the repro rights movement is going to actually be about justice it has to be run by the same people it serves.
I think a lot about Selma James’s line about “the process whereby women’s struggle is hidden from history and transformed into an industry, jobs for the girls.” She wasn’t, notably, implying that women shouldn’t get paid--just the opposite! She was, rather, noting that often the people who really led the struggle get brushed aside in favor of the Sheryl Sandberg types who come in and tell you that they run the movement now.
Let’s get into Chapter 5: Suffer for the Cause! In this chapter, you specifically discuss the issues at play in the repro movement, highlighting the experience of one worker, Ashley, the workers’ efforts to unionize Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, and the major union busting that happened there. Tell us a bit about what you found in your reporting?
Sarah Jaffe: I’d been chasing stories of Planned Parenthood unionizing for years because it was a wave--not just at PPRM, but at branches all around the country. There have been struggles in New York, in Texas where the fight continues as the state is in the deep freeze. But the PPRM story was the one that had been reported the most, out in the open, when I started work on this book, and lots of other folks weren’t ready to go on the record. Which I understand! The first thing that happens when workers in a movement organization make demands for themselves is they get blamed for helping the enemy--a particularly pernicious thing to say in repro where in addition to the usual workplace struggles, workers are often battling through a line of antis every day on the job. It’s extra exhausting work.
So what I found was, rather depressingly, a typical union busting story. Workers were pushed into captive audience meetings, blamed for being insufficiently dedicated to the cause, an anti-union law firm pushed to expand the bargaining unit so that workers who were outside of Colorado where the workers had been focusing their union drive would get to vote and presumably be more likely to vote no, all that before the election. Then, the union election came and they won anyway--and PPRM appealed the vote to the Trump National Labor Relations Board, which really angered the workers, because of course the Trump administration would cheerily have destroyed Planned Parenthood and called it a victory. Eventually, PPRM dropped the appeal and the workers got their union, and Ashley Brink, the worker I profiled in this chapter, left her job.
What were you most surprised about when it came to reporting the union busting that happened at Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains?
Sarah Jaffe: I wish I could say I had been surprised by any of it. Sadly, it was a by-the-books union busting campaign. There’s an industry around this for a reason.
“For an organization that claims to be feminist and states that they take on reproductive justice values, to also have staff that can’t afford to pay their bills or take care of their families...that is very hypocritical and frustrating. Those are not my values. So it is hard to say, ‘Yes I am proud of Planned Parenthood.’”
We’ve heard from workers about their desire to organize, but are worried that tactics like strikes would impact patient care. And, as your book explains, schools and clinics—like Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains—use this argument to keep teachers and clinic workers from advocating for better workplaces and rights. You wrote, “Pitting their staff against the people they serve, nonprofit managers argued that if more money went to salaries, services would have to be cut.” The book cites a Planned Parenthood regional director in Seattle claiming that she’d have to close clinics in order to offer medical leave for their employees, and the moment when numerous nonprofits that spoke out against former President Obama’s efforts to raise the overtime threshold. This binary seeks to place workers in opposition to the people we serve, making it seem as if our ability to have fair pay and equitable work environments will come at the expense of patient care, when not providing those things is detrimental to patient care. Why do employers insist on maintaining this binary?
Sarah Jaffe: Simply, because it works. Because they know that people don’t go to work in repro jobs like this just for the money--they do care, deeply, about the people they serve. And so they are told that they are privileged to “do what they love,” and how dare they ask for decent conditions? Hell, unions do this to their staffers! It makes me livid, frankly. The movements cannot and will not be sustainable if they are built on high turnover, burning out young staffers over and over again. It’s just that simple. As Ashley noted in my chapter, she was being flown all over the state to fill in for staffers who were out--there had, she pointed out, to be a more sustainable way to do things than to have her on a plane sometimes twice in one day.
An argument against raising wages, unions, increasing benefits, and/or paying interns is that it would cost too much and take away funds from the people we serve. Yet we can all read organizational 990s and see that the same CEOs making those arguments are paid salaries well into the six figures, and for that we’re told they have to be well-compensated so that the organization can attract and retain the best talent. Why such a discrepancy in these arguments? Are we just replicating the exploitative cycle of capitalism?
Sarah Jaffe: Which talent is important, and which talent is expendable, you know? There’s so little interest in investing in the talent when it walks in the door at the entry level and building those people up so eventually they can be the ones who run the show. Instead it’s burn through people and recruit executives from somewhere else. And who does that privilege?
Of course, it’s impossible to simply step outside of capitalism. It’s totalizing, it’s everywhere. Nonprofits have pressure from funders to have “deliverables” and all that jazz, and it’s understandable, but as you note--you can all read a 990 and see where the money goes.
“The desires of foundation heads to tamp down social unrest in the years after the wars—particularly in the 1960s, and particularly in the civil rights moment—sometimes clashed with the genuine wishes of lower-level nonprofit workers, who could find themselves squeezed between their political goals and the threat of losing funding.”
We’ve seen article after article come out about workers exposing toxic bosses (like at PPGNY and PPPA) and demanding an end to toxic, racist work cultures (like at IWHC and Women Deliver). We’ve also seen more reporting on toxic work cultures and subsequent union organizing in these workplaces. What would you like to see reporting on this topic explore next?
Sarah Jaffe: More more more more! I think we have to be less afraid to tell these stories. I won’t pretend that this wasn’t the most controversial chapter in my book. There were people who wouldn’t blurb the book because of it. I was asked whether I was just telling the story of one woman with an ax to grind. And of course the answer to that is no, not in the least, in fact there were probably 30 workers with a similar story who didn’t want to go on the record because they didn’t want to hear that same garbage, that same blame. But it’s the job of reporters like me to be willing to tell the story, and if that makes some people mad, that’s not actually my fault. It’s the fault of these continued cycles of bad management.
Sarah Jaffe is the author of Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted and Alone and of Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt, both from Bold Type Books. She is a Type Media Center reporting fellow and an independent journalist covering the politics of power, from the workplace to the streets. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, the Guardian, the Washington Post, The New Republic, the Atlantic, and many other publications.