Chris Duffy

Like whether it works or not for you, it's like we are doing work on this topic and there will be a test on this day.

And if you get enough of the questions right, you get this quote unquote good grade.

And it feels like one of the really important pieces of the conversation that you talked

have started with Work Won't Love You Back is that maybe the approval and the sense of worth should actually not be coming from the place that is paying you money.

I think it's really hard if you're doing work that is like, like you said, a nurse or you're working at a nonprofit that's fighting to clean up the environment or you are working on cancer research, right?

Like these things where it's like you are doing something that is so important.

Yeah.

And I'm sure it is extremely meaningful.

Right.

Maybe having a little bit more of a sense of like we can be agitating for a better world and we can push for better conditions rather than just thinking like, well, I have to take it as it is because this is the dream job or whatever.

I think that's a really different way of thinking about work than many of us have.

This is where we can also bridge the line between the two books, because you talk, I thought, very, very movingly in your more recent book, From the Ashes, about you draw a line between people who worked in coal mines and people who were working in care work and how for the coal miners, striking was very difficult.

But in some ways, the care workers struggled more with the emotional side of striking because they didn't want to leave the people they were taking care of, even though the conditions were

I also thought that a really moving piece of Kevin's story is that.

Kevin's experience of being in coal mine with a labor union involved a lot of really caring for other people, for the men that he was down there with in a dangerous situation and knowing that you could trust people and that they had your back, even if the bosses or the organization didn't.

And that that actually was a directly transferable skill to caring for people because it was in some ways that the union was care work.

It was just care work that they hadn't thought of in that way.

When I was teaching in an elementary school, it's never like I was politically right-wing.

But I realized that I had some ideas about unions that...

ended up changing because I was working at a charter school without a union.