Sarah Jaffe

When people ask me why I wrote this book, my joke is always like punk rock and crappy jobs.

My first job was picking up trash at an outdoor concert venue when I was 15 years old, which was cool because I got to see like David Bowie for free, which was great.

Also dating myself a little bit.

But, you know, it's fine.

Yeah, I scooped ice cream.

I worked in like a record store, but not a cool record store, like a suburban strip mall record store.

All this when I was in high school, I waited tables for years.

I went to university in New Orleans, which is where I also live now.

So I did a few stints in working in a couple of jazz clubs, which was, you know, fairly cool, but still waiting tables, not fun.

And I, let me see, I managed my parents' bicycle shop for a little while so I can change bike tire.

I can't true a wheel, but I can fix your brakes.

And what else have I done?

Let me see.

Yeah, I worked for a nonprofit for a little while with some kids.

I've done a lot of miscellaneous things.

I'm Sarah Jaffe.

I'm a journalist and the author of, among other things, Work Won't Love You Back, How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone, and From the Ashes, Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire.

Yeah, I think really like you hit the nail on the head there, which is I went from all of the service industry work that I more or less hated to, oh, this is exciting.

This is my dream job.

I'm a journalist now.

I've got, you know, I went to grad school, the whole thing, redid my life.

And my working conditions weren't that much better.

And as I joke on my website bio, like I didn't make more money at first when I was a journalist than I had been making in restaurants.

And so realizing that there was a lot in common there.

And actually, I will tell people all the time that waiting tables is great training for journalism because you have to be able to sort of keep a straight face no matter what someone says to you.

It's a really useful skill and being able to talk to people and like smooth things over when feathers get ruffled.

Like all of these things that I learned waiting tables actually have stood me in great stead as a reporter for the last 16, 17 years.

But that sense that like, oh, I'm not, my life hasn't changed as much as I thought it was going to.

I am still struggling to pay the bills.

I was living in New York City when I started work as a full-time journalist, which like...

Yeah.

And that understanding that like, oh, like this is cool and I'm glad I'm doing this.

And, you know, don't get me wrong.

I do not want to return to restaurant work.

But recognizing that at the end of the day, work is still work and we are still doing it at the end of the day because we've got to pay the rent, not because we just like woke up that morning and decided that slinging sushi to tourists in Denver would be great fun.

Like at the end of the day, I need to have other things that give me meaning and give me validation and give me the sense of doing something important in the world.

And like, look, I still do the work that I do, which like, let me tell you, there are many subjects that I could cover as a journalist that would pay better and have more job security than being a labor reporter.

But I keep doing it because I think it's important.

And I still talk to a lot of people who do jobs.

I talk to a lot of nurses.

I talk to a lot of teachers.

You know, I talk to a lot of people who are in these kinds of jobs where they are doing it because there is meaning in it for them.

And we would want that, right?

I don't want my nurse or my doctor to, like, only be in it for the money, right?

You want your kid's teacher to be engaged and care about kids, right?

I would be a terrible teacher because small children terrify me.

Like that, we don't want to get rid of that entirely, but we do want to have the understanding that like your life is more than this workplace and you get to have demands on your workplace.

And again, when you think about doctors and nurses, it makes sense, right?

I would like the hospital to be run by the people who know about providing health care rather than the people who know about, you know, counting budget numbers.

Yeah, you know, the place that I started that I think really got me, you know, going down this particular front was the Chicago Teachers Union.

And in 2012, you know, they went on the strike that was the first big teacher strike in the U.S.

in a long time.

And the argument that they made was, are working conditions or are students learning conditions?

And it was this really great way of it now, labor scholars and organizers call it, marketing for the common good.

And what they're saying is that actually...

if we are given better working conditions, if we are paid enough to actually live near the school that we teach in, if we have smaller class sizes, if there's toilet paper.

They were literally bargaining to get toilet paper in the bathrooms on the first day of school.

And so they sort of demonstrated their worth to the community by going on strike, which is the classic sort of labor tactic.

But they also really had this innovative argument that was saying to people,

You want our conditions to be better because it's actually good for everyone.

And the same thing is true of these nurses that I've been covering, nurses at University Medical Center in New Orleans, which is it used to be Charity Hospital, right?

And Charity Hospital was never reopened after Hurricane Katrina.

But its purpose to be an open access hospital that serves everyone, regardless of your ability to pay, that's been folded into University Medical Center.

And these nurses are fighting and they've unionized and they're planning now their third strike because they're still not getting what they want.

Yeah, Kevin.

Oh, my goodness, Kevin.

I love him so much.

So Kevin was a former miner in England, and he had been a coal miner through the 1984-85 strike, after which Margaret Thatcher basically crushed the British coal industry.

And this had been nationalized.

So in England, the government owned the mines.

So they were striking against the government, not just some faceless mine boss.

And, you know, they lost.

They got crushed.

And a lot of them had to go into different industries.

And not a lot of the men, for somewhat obvious reasons, went into care work.

But this guy, Kevin, that I was speaking to and, you know, you know, he's this big guy who had been working down a mine for decades.

And then the mine shuts down and he goes into care and he's working with people.

adult men who have various special needs.

And you think about it, right?

Because a lot of the people who do care work are like my size and I'm, you know, I'm literally the average size woman.

I'm five foot four and 130 something pounds.

Like if I have to restrain or lift or like physically interact with somebody who's a lot bigger than me, I'm going to hurt myself.

A guy who's six foot one and has been working down a coal mine.

really, really does bring something else to that work that like, you know, there are reasons to have a big dude do that work sometimes.

But also he really loved it.

And he found it meaningful in a totally different way than the coal mine had been.

But as you said, the conditions still sucked.

You know, he was saying and he was sort of more used to going on strike than a lot of the people that he worked with.

And he had a lot of the women that he worked with because the coal mines were literally all men.

It was illegal for women to work down the mines so that that whole thing, you know, he was like, OK, I'm ready to go on strike.

But a lot of the other people were like, oh, this is really hard for me because, yeah, we don't want to walk away from our patients because they need us.

The boss is the one screwing us over, not our patients.

Exactly.

It was so striking, right, to talk to him and also to talk to Chris Kitchen, who is the head of the union now, you know, and mostly his job because actually they closed down the last coal mine in Britain between when I finished writing this book and when we're talking.

And so there are literally no active members of the National Union of Mine Workers anymore.

There are just retirees and people who have gone into other industries.

And so...

When I talked to Chris Kitchen, you know, so much of his job was

He's either fighting for retiree benefits and health care and things, you know, where they have, you know, lung disease and things like that from going down in coal mines and breathing that air.

And then he's going to commemorations and celebrations because there are a lot of horrible things happened over the years, over the centuries, really, of the British coal mining industry.

And so it really struck me that like this man who is, you know, the leader of a coal miners union, his job is care.

His job is fighting for these, you know, his members health care and his job is commemorating its grieving.

Right.

It's commemorating the disasters and the people that were lost.

And that that was really true of the practice of solidarity, of being down the mine where it didn't matter if you like the guy next to you.

If the wall starts to cave in, you're going to grab him and get the hell out of there.

And then when I thought about the sort of entire social world of the miners outside of the mine that was built by the union.

So the union had the miners welfare hall, which was where you would go have a beer after work with your buddies.

And it was where you would have your wedding and it was where your children would be, you know, christened or baptized or I don't know, I'm Jewish.

And like that, that space, right, that social space also.

All of that is what went away when the mines went away.

Like what they miss is having a job that had some sense of purpose and having a decent wage that you could actually, you know, maybe send your kid to college so they didn't have to go down the mine.

To have a decent home and to have that kind of social life that was built in these places around the mines, because the mines are not in the center of a big city, right?

They're in rural areas.

Appalachia in the U.S.

They're in the north of England.

The destruction of that entire way of life means these towns are just, you know, they're wiped out.

And one of the things that to bring this back to care work, the first monument that I saw to COVID workers, right, was in Barnsley, which is the same place that the headquarters of the Mine Workers Union was in the north of England.

And I don't think that's an accident because they're used to commemorating workplace disasters.

And COVID was, among other things, a workplace disaster.

Yeah.

And it's so funny, right?

Because the story that we were told about teachers unions, right?

I remember hearing that growing up.

You know, oh, they just protect all the bad teachers and the rubber room myth and all that stuff.

Right.

And like the charter schools are going to be better because they make it easier to fire the teachers.

You know, and again, I live in New Orleans, which like our school district has one directly operated public school and it opened last year.

But since Katrina, otherwise it's been 100 percent charters and like the results haven't gotten any better.

But what you have is just a lot of turnover.

Instead, I worked in a nonprofit very briefly with kids who are like nine, 10, 11 years old and like, oh, my God, they're exhausting.

They're amazing.

They're exhausting.

Teaching is hard.

It gets better, like most skills do, over time.

And so you don't want to just turn it over with the new smart kid from this week who probably has zero patience with the kids.

You actually get better over time.

over time.

And so protecting your ability to get better over time is really important.

But also, there's places where you're having conversations with other teachers.

So you can say to them, like, hey, man, I had a really rough day this Tuesday.

And like, this happened with this kid.

And I don't know what to do.

Can you help me out?

Like, those structures, too, are part of what the union does, right?

MARK BLYTH, JR.

So the first thing I always say is like, yeah, talk to people.

What do your coworkers think?

How is everybody feeling about the job?

Is it just you?

It's probably not just you.

Also, don't use your workplace email to do that.

That's my number one bit of service journalism is if you're talking about organizing, don't do it on your work email or the work Slack.

Find out, get people's phone numbers, use Signal, use a protected app, something else.

That's my number one bit of service journalism.

If you're doing your organizing, don't do it where the boss can read it.

But those conversations, they are the building blocks of everything that comes next, right?

If you are thinking about organizing, you can also reach out to an organization, a union in your field, depending on what that is, the rules are.

For instance, you don't officially have to, if you are in the U.S., be a member of a union in order to have your collective rights on the job protected.

So you have the right under U.S.

labor law to organize and talk with and advocate for better conditions on the job with your coworkers, whether or not you're in a union.

This is something that I jokingly call the Newsies rule from, you know, the Disney movie musical where he goes, if we strike, then we're a union.

American labor law basically says that's true.

So also keep that in mind.

And then, yeah, think about what your demands are and then what leverage you have to meet those demands.

Right.

Because sometimes, you know, the thing that's true in a lot of these labors of love jobs, right, is that the boss will say to you, there are 20 other people just outside the door who would love to have your job.

And that might even be true.

Might be less true than they think, but we are in a somewhat tight labor market, but mostly still, you know, the good jobs are still hard to find.

Most of the jobs in the economy still are those, you know, waitressing jobs that I was doing.

So, you know, what leverage do you have?

Where is it that you can do a little something that makes your boss's life a little bit more difficult and convinces them to give you what you want?

I talked to a young woman who, she worked for the parks department doing sort of construction on historic buildings that the park service maintains.

She thought this was a great job.

This is, you know, she's out working on roofs and, you know, 20 degree weather, which doesn't sound great to me, but she loves it.

And also think it's important.

These questions of leverage are actually really important and interesting right now.

It's not so simple as just like, get all your buddies and walk off the job.

Sometimes it's easier to stay on the job and you can sit down on the job.

You can do a work to rule action, which is where you do your job exactly to every possible last little rule in your job description, which turns out the boss never actually wants because they want you to be doing so much more.

And you probably know how to do your job way better.

We're living through this moment where the public sector is just being demonized.

And it's also really interesting because I think people are starting to realize that that's wrong.

Part of what's happening and part of what the folks I've been talking to a lot at the Federal Unionist Network and others, they're really making a defense of the idea of the public good.

You know, the idea that there are jobs at the Port Authority, that there are jobs at the Park Service, that there are jobs at the Army Corps of Engineers.

I live in New Orleans, again.

I would like the Army Corps of Engineers to still be well-staffed, please, because they keep us above water.

These are jobs that people do.

You know, you take a pay cut when you work in the public sector, right?

You don't make as much money if you are an engineer with the Army Corps of Engineers as you could out in the private sector somewhere.

But you do it because you believe in the idea of the public sector.

You believe in the idea that like these are things we should do for the public good.

Again, to go back to those nurses in New Orleans at University Medical Center, you know, they are saying like we want to work in this kind of public hospital, this kind of open access hospital, because we believe everybody should be able to get care.

And I'm in Barcelona right now.

I'm at a writer's residency in this beautiful museum building.

We're on like the second floor of this museum building.

And they gave us a tour of it earlier in the history of it.

And there were pictures of snow.

And they were like, oh, yeah, it doesn't snow here anymore.

In the last 80 years, it has stopped snowing in the mountains in Barcelona.

We have been productive.

We have been so productive.

We have sent thousands and thousands of people down holes in the ground to dig up black rocks to set on fire.

And what it has gotten us is a rapidly warming planet, exhausted, and a lot of people with horrible diseases that died young.

And what would it look like to actually say that, like, we want to run the world for the good of of all of us rather than the good of Elon Musk getting richer?

The good of everybody who drives a car or takes a train or a boat in New York Port Authority or New Jersey or.

So it's everybody who takes a Staten Island ferry.

Which is one of my favorite public institutions.

I love the Staten Island Ferry.

It's free and you can get a beer on it.

You know, these things, like, wouldn't that be amazing if we had more public transit that was free and you could buy a beer on it?

Maybe not everybody needs to buy a beer on it, but still.

My father died in 2018.

So to look around at the stories that I was covering and the work that I was doing and realize like, oh, there's grief everywhere.

You know, I had lost people.

I lost my grandparents.

I had certainly had my heart broken before.

But losing a parent was something totally different.

And it was so destabilizing and so transformative.

And suddenly everywhere I looked, there was grief.

And I was like, oh, and also like I was trying to find things to read because I'm a nerd and I wanted to get an A in grieving the way I want to get an A in everything.

And so I was looking for like, what do I read?

What do I study?

What do I whatever?

And like nothing, nothing really captured what I was feeling.

And so I on some level, I wrote the book that I needed to read.

And also, you know, the way I deal with everything is to write about it.

And this one has been harder to metabolize than most.

It's been hard to talk about.

Doing press for this book has been rough.

It's been challenging to return to those feelings over and over again, you know.

But they returned for me anyway.

You know, we just passed the anniversary of my father's death.

And so, like, that month...

I know it's coming for me.

But it also comes for me at other moments.

It comes for me in moments that I won't even know what's going on.

And then I'm like, oh, it's just, okay, that's what's happening.

That's there.

And that sense that it's not just an easy thing to get over.

It suddenly made sense when I was doing stories on factory closures.

You know, in 2018 was Trump 1.0, and I was doing a lot of stories on factories closing.

I had been in Indiana.

I had been in Ohio.

And actually, the story is in the book where I was in Ohio.

I was covering the closure of the Lordstown plant, which is kind of a famous auto plant, General Motors plant, just outside Youngstown, Ohio.

And I was sitting in the office talking to Tim O'Hara, who was at the time the vice president of the union, and Dave Green, who was the president of the union, is now the regional director for the UAW in that area.

You know, he just comes in and flops on the couch and looks over at me and goes, you know how they say there are seven stages of grieving?

Well, we can't go through them because we don't know.

We're stuck in the middle, you know?

And I was like, huh, right.

This is a grief story.

Except it's a sort of disenfranchised grief is one of the terms for things like that, right?

Where you can't really go through it because it wasn't clear what was actually going to happen to the factory.

It has closed now since some of the workers are now working for a battery plant in the area.

Some of the workers got scattered all over the country.

But at the time, they didn't know it was still early and they were still trying to fight to keep it open.

And yeah, to realize like, oh, I'm already writing grief stories.

I'm writing stories of immigration and talking to people about what they leave behind.

You know, then 2020 hits and we get COVID and then we get the George Floyd uprising and we just get this double whammy of talking about grief in public, right?

And whenever we say Black Lives Matter and we say, you know, say their names, we're talking about grieving.

We're talking about, you know, that George Floyd should still be here, that Breonna Taylor should still be here.

There was this moment, right, when Joe Biden got elected and he sort of talked about his personal grief.

And I think that was meaningful for people.

That was really part of the reason people voted for him, you know.

And then they had sort of one commemoration for COVID.

And then it was quickly like back to normal, back to normal, back to normal.

Right.

When I was working on the book, I talked to sort of therapists and clinicians and practitioners about COVID.

grief and about how they deal with it and how they help people deal with it.

And so these are, you know, where I sort of learned these terms and disenfranchised grief is, again, a grief that can't be acknowledged, a grief that isn't recognized.

People are carrying around a lot of unacknowledged pain.

And that comes out, if we're lucky, it comes out in ways that are just sort of messy.

If we're really not lucky,

It gets toxic and it can destroy your relationships.

It can destroy your grip on reality.

It can destroy all sorts of things.

It can destroy your health, right?

It was so shocking to me how physical grieving was.

Talking to clinicians and people, it was like, yeah, I see people with flare-ups of autoimmune conditions when they're grieving.

All of these things happen.

And we just have no place for it, for the most part, in sort of late capitalist society, right?

We just sort of are supposed to get back to work.

I joked about wanting to get an A in grieving, but it's really true.

I was like, I'm going to be good at this.

I'm going to go to therapy.

I'm going to do the thing.

I'm going to get over it in record time, and I'm going to be good at grieving.

And like, oh, no, that's not how that works.

That is so not how that works.

In fact, the more you try to do that, the more you're going to screw yourself up, I think.

I certainly did anyway.

To be willing to allow it to happen on the clock that it happens at,

You know, it was easier for me in a way because I work from home.

You know, I'm freelance.

I had plenty of work I had to do, but I could kind of do it on my own time.

So if in the middle of the day I needed to take a break and just cry for an hour, I could go do that.

And that sense, you know, of like some degree of freedom that I had.

Which most people don't have, right?

If you're going to work at the GM factory and you got to, you know, do the same thing all day long and you're, you know, lifting up the thing and drilling a hole or putting a screw in or attaching a door or attaching a steering wheel or any number of things you might be doing on an assembly line.

You just got to do that.

And you can't pause the line so that you can cry.

And you can maybe cry while you're attaching the steering wheels, but you might screw it up.

So you probably don't want to do that.

And also, you probably don't want everybody to watch you while you cry while you try to attach a steering wheel on the assembly line while the cars are going by you, you know.

That middle voice, it was from a piece that was sent to me by the author Namwale Serpell, who wrote this beautiful book, The Furrows, about grief.

It's a novel.

It's incredible.

And the piece that talked about was talking about the concept of drift.

And I interviewed Namwali Serpell for a book forum and we were talking about grief.

And it made me think about a lot of things that aren't work in that way.

They aren't sort of volitional in that same way.

But like, I also think that love is kind of like this.

It happens in the middle voice.

You know, I would sort of think like I have to be actively doing things all the time.

And one of the things that grief sort of taught me is that I don't become unlovable because I need things for a while from people.

And I'm not always capable of immediately reciprocating.

Like when my father died, the people who knew what to say and what to do were people who had lost a parent.

And they reached out to me and were like, I heard your father died.

I'm sorry.

You know, some people would be like kind of gallows humor about it and say, welcome to the dead dad's club.

But it was people who had already been there.

And so sort of by definition, they didn't need me to do it back.

So the only way that I could reciprocate was to reciprocate to other people.

So that when I had friends in the months, weeks, years after my father died who lost somebody, I'm really annoying with this with people in my life, actually.

I'm like, you know, not to be relentlessly on brand, but you're grieving, honey.

And not just deaths, but also you lost a job.

Also, you moved across an ocean.

Also, you had a really bad breakup.

You got divorced.

I will be that person who's just like, it's grief.

And here's what you will probably need at some point.

And, you know, what can I do?

But also asking what I can do is kind of not helpful because you probably don't know what I can do.

So I'm going to offer I'm going to make you breakfast.

I'm going to make you cookies.

I'm going to come over and drag you out of the house and make you go for a walk.

You know, I'm just going to text and be like, here's a very silly meme that made me laugh.

Here is a picture of a cute dog.

I would not have gotten through the last six, seven years without the people who love me.

And I was very bad at asking for help.

I'm still pretty bad at asking for help, but I'm getting better.

The last talk that I did for it in public, my interlocutor was somebody who loves me very much and who literally held my hand through the conversation.

Those moments...

Where I had to realize that, like, this is part of it, that one of one of those two people who squished me between them in the back of the car, you know, I was apologizing for being a mess and needing to sleep on her couch.

And she was just like, that's what friends are for.

And I hear that in her voice still whenever I'm sort of being difficult to myself.

It's just like, oh, right.

This is like what we build these relationships for is to be there.

And, you know, I...

I'm honored when those people call on me in those moments, too, you know, that I want to be able to show up as much as they showed up for me.

And I want to be able to pay that outward to new people who haven't had to show up for me that way yet.

And that's what makes.

living in this screwed up world worth doing.

And that's also what gives us the energy and the power not only to change it, but to believe we can change it, to believe that actually we're better than the worst things that we're told about each other.

One of the federal workers that I was talking to, Colin Smalley, he's with the Army Corps of Engineers.

And he was saying that these attacks on the federal workforce are attacks on the entire idea that we should care about each other as humans.

And the way that we have organized that care in this world is through government.

And it's a little bit more complicated than that, obviously.

But like...

What would it be like, again, to organize a world around making sure everybody is cared for in that way?

And not just because those people have, like, worked really hard at building up good personal social networks, but because we all deserve it.

And we deserve that time off when we need it.

And we deserve to rest when we need it.

And we deserve to be fed when we don't have the energy to cook for ourselves.

You know, we deserve things as basic as a roof over our head.

Like just these basic, basic things that like we can do as a world, as a society, we can make sure that everybody is cared for.

Absolutely.

The line that gets repeated all the time and is credited alternately to Slavoj Žižek and Frederick Jameson is that, right, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.

And the Jewish tradition teaches that every life is a world, right?

So the end of every life is a whole world ending.

And so when you have to imagine the end of your personal world, somebody that close to you that is gone, right?

that you can't sort of just go through the world in the same way.

At first, you can't imagine anything.

But then slowly it's like, oh, well, I have to imagine everything anew anyway.

And maybe in that space, there is a possibility of imagining it better.

Thank you.

It's been great.