Season 2, Episode 3: Why We Have to Stop Expecting Work to Love Us Back, and How to Grieve What We Thought It Would Be Like -- with Sarah Jaffe

Written By Ellen Whitlock Baker

Sarah Jaffe on capitalism’s “labor of love,” grief, and why you can’t meditate your way out of a rigged system

Why work disappoints us, how grief shows up at work, and what it looks like to reclaim agency inside broken systems

Summary

What if the heaviness you feel at work isn’t a personal failing — but capitalism doing what capitalism does? Labor journalist and author Sarah Jaffe (Work Won’t Love You Back and From the Ashes) joins Ellen for a wide-ranging, deeply grounding conversation about why so many of us feel exhausted, disillusioned, and even heartbroken by our jobs. Together, they explore how “do what you love” culture, hustle narratives, and nonprofit martyrdom have trained us to expect meaning, identity, and emotional fulfillment from work — and how devastating it can be when those promises inevitably fall apart.

Sarah breaks down why burnout is not an individual resilience problem but a structural feature of capitalism, especially in nonprofit, public-sector, care, and mission-driven work. Ellen and Sarah dig into how love-based narratives are used to justify low pay, chronic overwork, and understaffing; why crises like the 2008 financial collapse and COVID made these systems suddenly visible; and how gender, race, and class shape who is expected to sacrifice the most. If you’re a leader who feels trapped by money, healthcare, responsibility to your team, or a lack of alternatives, this episode names that reality without judgment — and without pretending there’s a simple solution.

This conversation also offers a different way forward. Instead of self-care checklists or meditation apps that ask you to adapt to a broken system, Sarah and Ellen talk about grieving what we thought work would be, reclaiming agency inside imperfect conditions, and thinking collectively rather than individually. You’ll hear practical ideas like power-mapping your workplace, building community instead of self-blame, and understanding why “it’s not your fault” is both emotionally freeing and politically important.

Takeaways

  1. Burnout isn't a personal failing — it's a symptom of a system designed to exploit your labor while calling it "purpose."

  2. Grief is everywhere at work, whether it’s a toxic job, lost identity, or systemic loss we haven’t fully processed.

  3. Nonprofits and public sector work can be deeply exploitative, especially because they rely on people’s emotional investment to justify underpaying and overworking them.

  4. Capitalism needs you to love your job — not because it cares, but because love makes you easier to exploit.

  5. Change starts with awareness and collective action, not just self-care. You can't power pose your way out of systemic inequality.

Notable Quotes

"Burnout is a feature, not a bug, of capitalism."

"You can't meditate your way out of capitalism. I wish we could. I would've done it already."

"The system isn’t designed to make us happy — it’s designed to make money."

"Grief is political. Work is personal. And they’re more connected than we think."

"Even in nonprofits, love is often the bait for exploitation."

Show Notes

Find Sarah on her website and Twitter.

Books by Sarah Jaffe:
• Work Won’t Love You Back
• From the Ashes: The Remaking of the World

Listen to Sarah narrate both books on Audible.

Resources mentioned during the episode:

Chapters

00:01 – Meet Sarah Jaffe: Punk Rock, Bad Jobs & Becoming a Labor Journalist
06:45 – Work, Grief & the Lie That a Job Will Love You Back
13:00 – Inheriting Burnout: The Protestant Work Ethic & Working to Death
19:45 – Why Capitalism Needs You to Love Your Job
25:30 – Nonprofit Work Isn’t Exempt—It’s Often Worse
33:45 – Burnout, Budget Cuts & the Public Sector Trap
40:10 – How Structural Grief Shows Up at Work
47:30 – Immigration, Loss & the Realities of Global Labor
52:00 – Learning to Sit with Grief (and Ask for Help)
58:20 – Nursing, Gender & Devalued Labor
01:02:30 – It’s All Connected: Power, Patriarchy & Capitalism
01:07:25 – Hope, Hype & Hyping Each Other Up

Keywords: burnout, toxic workplace, capitalism and work, nonprofit burnout, emotional labor, workplace grief, women at work, Sarah Jaffe, labor journalism, workplace exploitation, middle management, systemic inequality, anti-capitalist feminism, work culture critique, employee burnout causes

Transcript

Ellen Whitlock Baker (00:01.998)

Hello everyone and welcome back to Hard at Work, the podcast. This is your host, Ellen Whitlock-Baker, and I'm really, really honored and delighted to be joined by the author, Sarah Jaffe today. Hi, Sarah.

Sarah Jaffe (00:15.399)

Hi, thanks for having me.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (00:17.356)

You're so welcome. You know what, we can cut this part out. forgot to ask you, is that the right way to pronounce your last name? Okay, perfect. We'll keep going. So Sarah is one of my favorite authors and I'm really happy to have her on because she tells the real truth backed by lots of data and science about why work kind of sucks so much for us. And...

Sarah Jaffe (00:22.097)

Yep. Absolutely. Great.

Sarah Jaffe (00:33.805)

Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (00:44.046)

kind of not necessarily what we can do about it, but it gives, your work gives so much context. So we'll get into that in a second, but before we do, tell us a little bit about you. Where are you? What got you to be this amazing author who talks about all of these hard things?

Sarah Jaffe (00:52.968)

Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (00:57.619)

Hello. Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (01:03.633)

a lot of lousy jobs. You know, people ask me this, they're like, how did you decide to become a labor journalist? How did you decide to write about all of these things? And my answer is like punk rock and lousy jobs. I had a lot of bad jobs in my life. I still have had a lot of, I still have to fight for all sorts of things. None of this has improved my situation all that much. Selling books improves your situation, it turns out. But like,

Ellen Whitlock Baker (01:05.486)

Ha ha!

Ellen Whitlock Baker (01:16.827)

huh.

Sarah Jaffe (01:33.267)

I bounced around the world a lot in my 20s trying to figure out what I was going to do. These headphones never stay in. My ears were not made for earpods.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (01:42.222)

I'm really impressed that you still have the, me too, I have to like it, but I'm impressed you have the wired ones. You're, that's. Okay, okay.

Sarah Jaffe (01:46.387)

Yeah, anyway. Well, I have to have the wire ones because they do that. And if I don't have that, then they just fall out. And then I just lose them and they cost too much. Anyway, yeah, so I spent a lot of my 20s trying to figure out what one does with an English degree, which the answer to that is wait tables and more waiting tables. And I went back to school for journalism in 2007, which meant I finished my master's program in 2009, which was a great time to go out into the world and try to get a job.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (02:11.095)

Nice.

Sarah Jaffe (02:13.883)

A few of my professors tried to convince me to stay and do a PhD, which might have been smart because there might have still been academic jobs by that time if I had done a PhD then. But right now there are not. And I am doing a PhD now because I am a smart person who decided to do that in her 40s. so I'm coming to you from London, England, but in the between times of me doing a, you know, master's in journalism and doing a PhD also in media studies, I did work as a journalist for 15, 16.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (02:20.856)

Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (02:43.523)

ish years. And I realized kind of going into journalism, that I thought, this is great. Now I have like a real job. Now I'm like a real adult professional person. I won't have any of these problems anymore. Right? no. And what was fascinating to me, I think, and this is how I got to write work on love you back, was that I had a lot of the same problems in journalism as I had waiting tables.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (03:06.67)

Interesting.

Sarah Jaffe (03:11.739)

Sexual harassment turns out a problem in both fields, but so many other things besides. so I would talk to people about their working conditions and find out how many different industries working conditions were not that different to mine and mine that were not that different to when I had been doing something that ostensibly was totally different. So that's the sort of long-winded story of how I got to write that book. And then my most recent book, which is like prominently displayed behind me, because nobody cares as much about it as they do about Work Won't Love You Back.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (03:15.307)

no.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (03:31.086)

Mm.

Sarah Jaffe (03:41.405)

Thank you. Is, it's, yeah, it's a book about grief. And it's a book about grief in this particular nightmare political moment that we're all living through. And what's been fascinating to me is people who want to talk to me about both books and pull out the threads that connect them, which is great. Cause I thought a lot of people would be like, why are you writing this weird book about grief? We expect different from you. So yeah, so that's the long-ish version of who I am and why I'm here.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (03:43.196)

it's gorgeous. They should.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (04:04.28)

Mm. Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (04:12.014)

love it. And there are so many threads between the books. also, I mean, just personally, the talking about grief was so helpful for me to put words to what I am feeling right now. And I know a lot of us are, I mean, I experienced a loss this year. So I understand that piece of the grief. You know, it's just they happen. And the older we get, I think you and I are about the same age, like the

Sarah Jaffe (04:26.864)

Yeah. Yeah.

I'm sorry. Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (04:37.714)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (04:39.982)

the older we get, the more it happens. But there's all of this other grief that we're not thinking about. And I've just realized this last year, I'm grieving this career I thought I was gonna have, or that I did have actually, was successful in, but then turned out I didn't like. And it's this whole, it's this whole sort of undoing. So can you talk a little bit, like I wanna get into capitalism and the threads and stuff like that, but like.

Sarah Jaffe (04:48.806)

Yeah. Yeah. Mm Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. Mm-hmm. Yes. Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (05:07.714)

Cause I think it's so important to understand the undergirding of where we are, but like talk a little bit about grief. Like what got you to that place of like, it's grief. That's what it is.

Sarah Jaffe (05:10.374)

Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (05:16.316)

Yeah. Yeah, I think it's really interesting what you said there because like when I was then working on the grief book and I was writing Work Won't Love You Back in the time sort of immediately following my father's death, which is what got me onto writing about grief. So I literally sort of came back and like wrote the Work Won't Love You Back proposal in a haze. had been preparing for it for months. But yeah, so that book sort of immediately came out in that moment. And then I went back and I was like, I have to sort of do

Ellen Whitlock Baker (05:36.632)

Wow. Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (05:45.735)

this to get it out of me. But only in going back to that I realized that all of the stories and work won't love you back because each chapter starts with the personal story of someone who has worked in particular industry. They have been sort of disappointed by that industry and then they have turned to organizing in order to make it better. That's the that's the what you can do about it part of the book. Right. And so I had these these conversations with people who often were grieving their job.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (06:04.814)

Mm-hmm.

Yep, yep.

Sarah Jaffe (06:14.286)

in a very particular way, which is like they had also been let down by it. And they had been let down by this broader set of narratives that tell us that like, you do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life. I have me a Tokimitsu's, do what you love somewhere up there on the shelf too, right? This idea that like a good job will make us happy. A good job will fulfill us in all of these ways. A good job will sort of...

Ellen Whitlock Baker (06:32.171)

Nice.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (06:38.113)

Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (06:42.246)

take up the space that like maybe romantic love should have taken up. I've just been going through my notes on on Kathy Weeks's newest book, which she talks about this sort of romance narrative and how it is applied to the workplace as well as to to love of another person, right? And like, so bringing all of these things together, it makes a lot of sense that like, I'm

Ellen Whitlock Baker (06:46.958)

Mmm.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (06:53.688)

Cool.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (06:58.776)

Sarah Jaffe (07:09.052)

thinking about grief as something political and I'm thinking about work as something personal, right? That we're struggling to make it through a world that like, I was just talking to somebody who is writing a book on the idea of the end of history, right? Which was this famous proclamation from Francis Fukuyama in the 1990s that we reached the end of history and capitalism has won this like existential battle with the communists, right? And therefore we're just gonna go forward into the proud capitalist future and

Ellen Whitlock Baker (07:29.252)

Wow.

Sarah Jaffe (07:38.309)

almost as soon as that happened, like capitalism tried to kill itself, right? It was 2008 and it was just like, why is this thing collapsing around us? And that becomes the moment when we can talk about capitalism as a system, not just to compare it with the Soviets, but to actually talk about like what we have and what we live under and what might be wrong with it and why it seemed to have completely collapsed on itself. And yet it's at the same time, we sort of have zombie capitalism now. And that's, yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (07:43.074)

Yep. Yep.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (08:02.143)

Great.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (08:06.242)

I love that. It's like in its death throes. But yeah, is it?

Sarah Jaffe (08:08.898)

Yeah. Well, that's the, we tend to talk about like late capitalism these days, and I tend to at this point go like whenever people say late, I was like, that sounds too hopeful for me. Like, I feel like it's going to be late and even later and even later and really too late capitalism. Yeah. Yeah, that the zombie thing is, is, you know, again, I'm bringing up sort of monsters and death and grief and all of this and like, you know, my

Ellen Whitlock Baker (08:19.99)

Yeah, I loved that.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (08:25.25)

I like zombie.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (08:35.148)

Yeah. Which you say like it's a Marx, like he uses that to describe, was, that's such a cool metaphor. I didn't realize that.

Sarah Jaffe (08:38.802)

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Absolutely. Right. Yeah. No. Like Marx talks about like werewolves and vampires and zombies in all of this. Right. Capital is dead labor, which, you know, survives on living labor. And I'm missing up the exact quote. This is why I need to have a big dramatic copy of capital behind me that I can pull down and read from like a proper academic. But, you know, that it lives on living labor. My friend, Molly Krabappel, has used this to describe

generative AI, right? The generative AI is literally turning our living labor as creative people into dead labor that is just regurgitated back to us by chat, GPT or Claude or Grok or whichever terrible one you want to use. So we're in this moment where we have so much to grieve. And yet we're sort of not allowed to because we got to keep working, right? And we got to keep loving our jobs, right?

Ellen Whitlock Baker (09:17.656)

Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (09:32.354)

Yep. Yeah. It's such an interesting thing. like, not to get too personal because I want to hear more from you, but like, it's felt like a divorce. I realized the other day I was like, not, I haven't been through a divorce, like, that's what it feels like. It's like, if I see so, I don't really want to run into anyone or like, you know, it's like, you don't want to go to the party and have your ex be there.

Sarah Jaffe (09:46.759)

Mm-hmm.

Sarah Jaffe (09:56.53)

Mmm, yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (10:01.098)

It's you get the, it's that same feeling. It's really weird of, and I've been lucky to have this year where I'm doing something I love, but you still need to make money and it is hard to do that on your own. And so one of the things I really liked about both books is sort of the tie in of, guys, we're in capitalism, by the way, which I find people are often afraid to even say that word, just like patriarchy, even though it's

Sarah Jaffe (10:12.774)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (10:26.308)

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (10:29.248)

literally just the description of where we are, you know? But can you, do you find that too? Like people are sort of afraid of, of acknowledging that we live in capitalism? Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (10:30.854)

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (10:38.82)

Yeah, you're sort of not supposed to say it out loud, right? It's a bit rude to be like, well, you we live in a capitalist system and this is, all people are like, well, what can you do about this? And I was like, over there with capitalist mode of production and like, it's partly a joke, but of course it's also not. And to think about this thing that we're in is sort of, you the joke about somebody asking the fish, asking the other fish, how's the water? And the fish goes, what's water? You know, like,

Ellen Whitlock Baker (11:05.2)

Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (11:07.58)

this is just how it how it is. This is the world we work. Right. And we work in order to pay the bills, but also, you know, the whole labor of love narrative that I'm talking about and work won't love you back tells us that we know, no, no, we work to find meaning. We work because it brings us pleasure. And it's like, well, no, it doesn't. Like we work. Sorry, there's like motorcycles or something outside. You know, we work to have a roof over our heads. Right. We work to be able to eat.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (11:10.23)

Yeah, we don't know anything else.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (11:31.862)

London.

Sarah Jaffe (11:37.221)

we work to be able to travel, maybe have a little time off and have some fun on the weekends. But like, this isn't a choice. This wasn't like a democratic decision where humans got together and thought the best way we can spend, you know, 40 hours of our week is in an office somewhere or in a factory or in a, you know, on a bicycle bringing you, because I'm looking out my window, looking at like delivery couriers go by in the rain, because I'm in London, so rain.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (12:01.68)

yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (12:04.036)

And going right, like nobody thought that like, this is a great way to spend my time, right? That was not a calculation. It was an, you know, a power differential that trapped us in this cycle. And that's what we're not supposed to acknowledge is the power that brought us here and the power that keeps us doing what we're doing while like, you know, meanwhile, Elon Musk has more money than like any human could possibly ever need or do anything with or whatever.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (12:08.726)

Right, right.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (12:31.576)

Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (12:33.284)

And like, this is a set of structures that allow some people to get obscenely, obscenely wealthy. And the rest of us, even if we're doing OK, you know, and I like my little apartment here in London and I'm enjoying my PhD research at the moment. But like, I still have to get up and work in the morning if I am going to continue to pay the bills. If I don't do the work that I'm supposed to do right now, I not only

Ellen Whitlock Baker (12:41.518)

Mm-hmm.

Sarah Jaffe (13:00.912)

lose my ability to pay the bills, but also lose my ability to stay in this country because I'm on a student visa. All of these things are predicated on me doing the work that I'm promised to do. So in a lot of ways, there's a lot of unfreedom tied up with the job in different ways. And it can be really hard to look that in the face. It does bring up, as you're saying, a kind of grief.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (13:06.808)

Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (13:25.356)

Yeah. I love the word unfreedom. That's a cool word. Yeah, it's

Sarah Jaffe (13:28.338)

Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (13:34.018)

Like you talk about in From the Ashes, you say that your father worked himself to death. that's, and he really instilled in you this work ethic and you've worked one, two, three, four jobs at a time. I was a theater major and did the same thing. Cause like, what do do with a theater degree? I had four jobs at once. Woo woo. And I got like so sick because it's like so hard to gig in that way. so like.

Sarah Jaffe (13:52.502)

yes, Theater Kids Unite, yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (14:04.406)

What about, why do think he did work so hard? And what does it teach? What did it kind of get you to think about, about why that is so deadly, honestly?

Sarah Jaffe (14:14.236)

Yeah.

Yeah, it's funny because I joke about the Protestant work ethic. My dad was sort of the epitome of the Protestant work ethic. was just like, you just work hard. That's what you do. There was not a lot of like, well, actually there was. There was kind of this confusion in my family where at the one hand, they would encourage me to do really well in school so that I could get the kind of job that I would enjoy. And on the other hand, it was just like, you just work hard at whatever you do and you work hard in school because it's your job to work hard in school. And then after that, it will be your job to work hard at something else.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (14:26.572)

Yep.

Sarah Jaffe (14:46.654)

And, you know, my dad was a second generation Jewish immigrant. His parents literally owned a Jewish deli. That was, you know, that was the thing. And that was the story. Best bagels in Boston, even though they were in Brookline, that is a win. I know I love it. I'm glad that you pulled that line out. It, yeah, it actually reminds me of somebody else who I'm grieving, who's my friend, Joshua Clover, whose book is also behind me and who passed this year.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (14:56.088)

Best bagels in Boston.

Sarah Jaffe (15:14.628)

And I, you know, I hang a lot of stuff in both of these books, actually, on arguments that he wrote. And he also spent some time in Boston as the only other person I knew who, like, remembered having gone to my grandparents Jewish delicts. He was a little older than me and he was like, my God, Coolidge Corner, Jaffee, pick a chick. And I was like, yeah, that was my family. So, yeah, so everything is grieving.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (15:29.188)

that's so cool.

Amazing, amazing.

Yeah, yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (15:41.604)

Yeah, you just, you you think that I'm

Sarah Jaffe (15:48.647)

There will be more time, I guess. And I think about my father dying basically right as he finally retired and sold the bicycle shop that they owned. Yeah, it's just, I'm sort of like, yeah, exactly. You just kind of keep going until you are allowed to stop and then your body gives out. And I don't want that for me. I don't want that for anyone. What an awful story.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (15:51.299)

Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (15:58.104)

That's, I hate that story. Yeah. It's common.

Sarah Jaffe (16:17.956)

I think, you know, my dad's small businesses failed in the late 90s, mid to late 90s. Like a lot of them do, right? He owned at one point like a string of family style restaurants that then like a few of them went out of business and then all of them went out of business. And he wanted to start over. And so we moved to South Carolina and he, you know, bought a bicycle shop and worked seven days a week for a lot of the next 15 years.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (16:35.501)

Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (16:47.762)

And despite the fact that 50 % of all small businesses fail, despite the fact that like all of us fail at things over the course of our lives, I think you took that really personally. And I don't think you should have. And I think, you know, having this sort of systems analysis, even at the same time as I'm doing journalism and I'm telling specific people's stories, is a way to understand that this thing that like, you know,

Ellen Whitlock Baker (16:59.783)

Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (17:16.338)

the story that I was told as a kid that, oh, work hard and you'll succeed, like, was bullshit. was absolute, it was garbage, right? It's not true. And yeah, you know, like, right, like again, the guy on the delivery bike outside in the rain in winter in London when it's dark at four o'clock is working a lot harder than Elon Musk. And there is no way to deliver enough takeaway curries to

Ellen Whitlock Baker (17:21.432)

Yes. Yeah.

and it sucks.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (17:39.232)

Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (17:44.994)

various people of North London to make as much money as Elon Musk. It's literally impossible. So to understand the way that the deck is stacked against us and all of these potential

Ellen Whitlock Baker (17:51.086)

Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (18:00.563)

Yeah, all of these potential aspects of it is to say, you were telling me a story before we turned the recording on about seeing somebody pick up my book in a bookstore and saying, oh, you should buy that. And she was saying, will it make me feel better about my crappy job? And I was like, no, but also maybe yes, because it will tell you that the problem is not your fault. It is not your inability to work hard enough or to love your job enough that makes your job suck. It's.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (18:17.388)

Nope. Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (18:22.263)

Yes.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (18:28.43)

And yeah, that's huge.

Sarah Jaffe (18:29.072)

the structures of exploitation that make your job suck. And even if your boss is like a decent person who wants you to enjoy your job, it still sucks sometimes because like the pressures of the job are not ultimately designed to make us happy. They're designed to make somebody money.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (18:39.373)

Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (18:47.168)

It's, mean, you say it so easily. think it takes a lot of us don't even know that or won't acknowledge it. Or it takes us a while to realize that I talk a lot on here about burnout and how it's not your fault because every solution to burnout is based on you changing yourself. Like, go to yoga more or meditate or, know, and it's how you can't meditate your way out of capitalism, you know.

Sarah Jaffe (18:53.958)

Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (19:06.886)

Yeah. Right. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (19:14.49)

You cannot meditate your way out of capitalism. That is so real. I wish we could. I would have done it a long time ago.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (19:17.302)

I wish you could.

I know, and so I really like, love to hear you talk about this and like, what are some, like, I can't pull all of them out and they're in your brain, but like, what are some reasons why capitalism wants to kind of keep us in this place where we feel like we need to love our job and give everything to our job, and yet it totally burns us out and drains us and takes everything.

Sarah Jaffe (19:46.771)

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think the totally burns us out and drains us and takes everything is a feature, not a bug, right? That was the story. Again, I'm doing this PhD project that involves reading, you know, sort of histories of early industrial capitalism. And like nobody expected you to like working in a textile mill in Manchester in 1857, right? Like nobody thought that that was going to be a fun way to spend your day. That was just the option was that or Starf.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (19:54.67)

Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (20:05.422)

Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (20:13.456)

because the farm was maybe enclosed and the options that you had were crap and you could get a job at a textile mill because you were a girl and they like little fingers and don't ask how young those girls were working in those factories picking cotton and weaving and whatever, right, and spinning. Nobody thought this is gonna be fun. That was just what you had the choice of doing, right? And the idea that it would be enjoyable.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (20:23.406)

Mm-hmm.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (20:35.362)

No, work wasn't supposed to be fun, yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (20:41.762)

is a relatively sort of recent historic development. And I argue that it comes out of two types of work that are more and more prominent as industrial labor has shrunk as a percentage of the work we do, both in the US, the UK, Western Europe, the industrialized countries, and also as a percentage of global labor performed. This is what deindustrialization means.

What we get instead is, we're told it's going to be exciting creative labor, right? That's going to be, you get to be a journalist, you get to be a writer, you get to be a TV producer, you get to be a computer programmer who's making fun video games. And like all of those are jobs that exist. There are people who do them. I have friends in them and acquaintances in them and people that I've interviewed in them for various articles and books. But that's not what most people are doing. Most people are more likely to be out there delivering.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (21:16.312)

Mm-hmm.

Sarah Jaffe (21:38.685)

takeaway and cooking the takeaway and waiting tables and cleaning bathrooms and all of the service work that is more akin to the work that has always historically been done in the home, whether we like it or not, we still don't have robots that will clean the toilet and historically been done by women. And the story around that was that we do it out of love, right? You take care of the family and you take care of the home and you take care of whatever, because you love them.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (21:56.531)

Yeah, I wish.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (22:06.702)

Thank

Sarah Jaffe (22:09.138)

and not because, it needs to be done and somebody has to do it. And so the story of loving your job, right, has these roots in material changes in the structures of capitalism, not just the narrative that your boss says you should love your job, what do you mean? Or HR professionals in the history of, know, HR telling you, coming up with various ways to convince people to work harder by being more committed to the job.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (22:36.878)

Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (22:38.514)

all of these things play into it. But at the bottom, it's a switch away from industrial jobs where the bargain is more or less, well, you'll do this and it'll suck, but you'll get paid halfway decently and you probably have a union to now you have to be your own boss and you have to like it and you have to yada yada yada, whatever, enjoy your job. And

Ellen Whitlock Baker (23:00.248)

Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (23:02.706)

What's been fascinating is, course, that Work Won't Love You Back came out in 2021. I did a lot of Zoom interviews for it because it was lockdown. And I think that what the COVID pandemic really showed us is that your boss doesn't care if you die, in so many words. Some of maybe do. I heard this from so many people that I talked to during the various lockdowns and post lockdown cycles.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (23:09.762)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (23:23.554)

Yeah

Sarah Jaffe (23:32.017)

some version of like, wow, I realized my boss doesn't care if I die. And maybe they don't want you to die. They probably don't. But like, ultimately, the system, yeah, the system requires us to work. That is where the value comes in and capitalist value creation is from the labor that we put in. And

Ellen Whitlock Baker (23:42.072)

You're expendable. Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (23:55.833)

at the end of the day, if your boss cares too much about your happiness, then he's not gonna make any money. And then he goes out of business and then somebody else will take over the shop. so we have this thing, right? The system that is not designed to make us happy. It's designed to make a few people money. It's designed to consolidate those assets. It's designed to create tax shelters so that those people can continue to consolidate those assets.

Sarah Jaffe (24:24.838)

But it's not built on happiness, health, the survival of the planet long-term, fun things like that, right? And from the ashes, I sort of go into like, it cannot sort of care about our lives on these individual levels, the levels on which we experience those lives and that we care about other people. And so it just has to sort of plug more people into the gap.

in order to make more money.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (24:57.912)

Yeah, yeah. it's so disheartening when you kind of realize some of the, like I live in Seattle and like, you know, Amazon and Microsoft have these big layoffs and you're like, no, they must be doing badly. No, it's just like a tax thing. They lay people off for a tax thing because like it's that concept of the employee being a liability and not an asset, which is the whole, an interesting conversation. Apparently what's taught in business school, not that I went to that, but

Sarah Jaffe (25:14.274)

yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (25:20.594)

Mm-hmm. Yep. Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (25:27.684)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (25:27.938)

You know, it's...

It, I got, I have so many things I want to ask you after what you just said, but one is you talk about this and I think you can connect themes in both books, but you talk a little bit about the nonprofit world, in, in work won't love you back. And then you talk in from the ashes about sort of community organizing and how it might bring us some relief from this. A lot of us.

Sarah Jaffe (25:33.66)

Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (25:43.794)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (25:53.382)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (26:00.398)

listening are in the nonprofit or public sector. And we've talked to a couple people who are like, Hey, guess what? That, that's one of the most vicious places to work because you're not making a profit, but then you're just not treated well at all. And like, when I think about what you said about the factory worker, like I've talked to so many people that it's like, it's just a job. You go in, you do the thing and then you leave. And people in the nonprofit sector are like, Oh no, it's not.

Sarah Jaffe (26:10.022)

Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (26:18.748)

Mm-hmm.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (26:29.696)

saving the world. So like, how did that, how did that sort of nonprofit vibe get to be so bad? And then, and I, you know, it's, it's white women. No, just kidding. I'm, I'm all kind of, it's, it, yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (26:30.054)

Yeah, exactly.

Sarah Jaffe (26:36.76)

Mm-hmm. Real. Yeah. Well, no, mean, it is women. No, it's this history, right? When we say not for profit, right? The idea, therefore, is that it will be set up somewhat differently than a corporation that has for profit. Or you could be like a B corporation, which is for profit, but still somehow for social good, which is also just a term that's become meaningless.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (26:52.801)

Ahem.

Sarah Jaffe (27:06.546)

But whatever, sure. And this idea that there's certain work that we shouldn't be paid for, right? That this is work that's done out of love and therefore getting paid for it is a little icky, right? But it's one of the common terms for the thing that became the nonprofit sector was like social housekeeping. If that gives you a clue to why women, right? That, you know,

Ellen Whitlock Baker (27:16.418)

Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (27:34.658)

Which you just said earlier, we're supposed to love, we do it out of love. Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (27:37.491)

Right, right, right, right, right. And the roots of this sector, again, are in wealthy women who were starting to get access to some education, but not access to good jobs still, right? And good jobs meant being doctors, lawyers, the kind of person who has a fancy office. So what can you do if you are an overeducated...

Ellen Whitlock Baker (27:51.383)

Yah.

Sarah Jaffe (28:02.512)

you know, middle class woman with some family money or your husband has money or something, something, whatever. And you want to do something with your time. Well, you can go out and you can fix everyone else around you, right? You can go tell the poor ladies that they're poor because they're not bathing enough and not wonder where they might bathe, right? If you go into their houses and you realize that, they don't have anywhere to bathe. That's why they're not bathing. That's not what makes them poor, right? The thing that is happening is I can't bathe because they're poor. Why are they poor?

Ellen Whitlock Baker (28:20.663)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (28:31.538)

because nobody's paying them enough, right? Because the landlord charges too much for the house without a bath in it. This history, which is fascinating and it is sort of depressing and also fun to read about, right, is based in the labor of people who didn't really need to do it for money and were bored a little bit.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (28:53.644)

Yep. Yep.

Sarah Jaffe (28:54.506)

and also genuinely wanted to make things better around them, right? Like they genuinely saw inequality in the world. They genuinely thought, my God, this is horrible. Sometimes they came up with really good solutions for it. Sometimes they came up with really awful solutions for it. Eugenics, man. But like, either way, you know, I don't want to say that like there was no genuine care in there. There's a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of real genuine care in the nonprofit sector now.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (29:19.79)

Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (29:22.706)

which is why you still get sort of overeducated men, women, non-binary folks, everyone, right? Going into this sector, wanting to do that rather than to go work for Elon Musk and make him the richest, richest, richest person in the world or work for Amazon or any number of other places, right? But then you get there and it's still a capitalist workplace, right? It still exists in the system. You cannot sort of extract from it.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (29:38.765)

Yeah, yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (29:44.971)

Yes!

Sarah Jaffe (29:49.575)

They both have to compete in the market for employees and also they're basically working with capital that is handed over by the Ford Foundation. Where does the Ford Foundation come from? The Ford Foundation comes from the Ford family who made a lot of money selling Ford automobiles and still do. What does the Rockefeller Foundation come from? Oil money, that's where it comes from.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (30:06.766)

Yep.

Sarah Jaffe (30:15.486)

And this is, you know, it's a little bit of, I think in the book I refer to it as, you know, it's like putting band-aids on the gaping wounds created by capital with capital provided by capital, right? Ruth, yeah, I mean, Ruth Wilson Gilmore has this wonderful phrase about capitalism, saving capitalism from capitalism. And there are all sorts of ways that that happens. And she uses it a lot talking about like the 2008 financial crisis, but also the nonprofit sector, which Ruthie's also written beautifully about.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (30:22.414)

100%. Yeah.

to make them feel better. It's like,

Ellen Whitlock Baker (30:34.594)

FF-

Ellen Whitlock Baker (30:40.43)

Hmm.

Sarah Jaffe (30:45.4)

is another way that capitalism saves capitalism from capitalism. And so when we think about it that way and like, look, I, you know, we all have to eat still. I am, you know, somewhere in between journalism and academia at this moment. So like, I'm in, I'm in plenty of compromised sectors. I subsist on a lot of foundation money and a lot of money made by big capitalist publishers that publish me. And they also publish people who like are actual fascists. That's just what happens in these massive conglomerates, right?

Ellen Whitlock Baker (31:02.722)

Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (31:15.314)

That is how it is, unfortunately. But I think the thing about the nonprofit sector, you know, what is her name? The woman who's on Instagram and TikTok and does the nonprofit boss clips? She's so great. She's so great. Yeah. And she's so funny. And it's just like, well, you know, I just got back from my holiday in Bali, and that just made me think that like all of you, you you need to work harder or something like that. Right. It's it's

Ellen Whitlock Baker (31:28.62)

I love her. Yes. She's, it's perfect. Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (31:44.044)

Yeah, yeah, it's the most passive and she's always eating something. It's like, it's the best. Because we've all had that boss, like it maybe been that boss, right? yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (31:45.605)

Yeah, she's she's. Yeah, yeah, she's so good. We've all had that boss. I mean, I hope not. But like, yeah, that that that that is the story that you will hear, right? It's like, but if we give you a raise, then it will come out of the pockets of the people we're trying to help. Or, you know, it will somehow affect, you know, the story. Yeah, the story that I frame that chapter with in the book is a

Ellen Whitlock Baker (32:05.878)

Right, right.

There's not enough to go around. Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (32:14.854)

worker at Planned Parenthood. And they were part of a huge wave of union organizing at Planned Parenthood that is still ongoing. know, this was, God, I mean, I think they were unionizing in the first Trump administration. So it's only gotten worse since. Where, you know, Planned Parenthood had gotten a ton of donations because a lot of people's response to Trump getting elected the first time was like the ACLU and Planned Parenthood donated to, both of which had big union drives going on during all that.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (32:37.731)

Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (32:44.306)

partly because they were like, where is all this money going? It's not going to pay staff. We are still understaffed and underpaid. Planned Parenthood is not just a nonprofit. It's also like a series of medical clinics outside of which you have rampant anti-abortion protesters who are trying to physically prevent people from coming into the clinic. You have all sorts of things. This worker that I spoke to was in Colorado, which is, there had been

Ellen Whitlock Baker (32:46.83)

Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (32:58.146)

Mm-hmm.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (33:05.006)

Yeah, it's dangerous, yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (33:13.394)

clinic shootings in the not too distant past. There are all sorts of reasons why they wanted a union besides just more money. But they also did want more money because, you know, it's hard to actually do a good job when you're worried about whether you can pay your bills. And that's not a problem, you know, and Ashley said to me, like, part of our feminist values should be that we are able to have a decent

Ellen Whitlock Baker (33:35.182)

Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (33:41.883)

living that should be part of what Planned Parenthood believes in, not that like decent health care for the people who use our clinics is provided on the backs of people of just like waves of idealistic young people who come in, burn out and are replaced by the next wave right out of college, right? And that is too often what the nonprofit sector runs on what labor unions themselves staff runs on, right? it's there, you just get

Ellen Whitlock Baker (34:07.258)

Yeah, yeah, they're young, yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (34:11.314)

waves of idealistic young people. And this is not that different than the story that, you know, computer programmers were telling me when I was talking to the video game programmers, right? It's again, it's a wave of young people come out of school, really excited to work on video games. And then they're expected to work 100 hours a week, the weeks before they're shipping a big game. like, so as the guy from, forget which games company that makes Red Dead Redemption, I am not actually a video gamer. So I apologize. But this guy like literally went out and bragged before the

Ellen Whitlock Baker (34:38.765)

No cook.

Sarah Jaffe (34:41.158)

the game or after the game had like hit the markets that like the staff were working 100 hour weeks leading up to that, you know, and it's like, well, these stories actually sound really familiar. And this is the thing that like, you know, the bit of the book that if anything, I hope, you know, allows people to feel a little bit better is like, again, you are not alone. This is not some unique problem that you face.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (34:46.669)

Buh.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (35:02.092)

Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (35:05.378)

On the flip side, does mean that collectively we kind of have to just get together and do something about it because it's not a thing. You can just like kind of quit one job and find a slightly better job and you will avoid these problems.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (35:17.164)

what would you say to the average nonprofit or higher ed or anywhere really, middle manager listening to this who feels all of this, but also a lot of the women that I work with feel trapped because they have to make money and they feel like they can't leave these honestly sometimes just absolutely toxic, horrible situations.

Sarah Jaffe (35:30.961)

Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (35:36.274)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (35:44.876)

because they have to keep making money and where else am gonna work in public? Like, what do you say to those folks who feel so trapped?

Sarah Jaffe (35:53.009)

Yeah, I mean, it is a trap, right? It is literally designed to trap you. that's, you know, yeah, no, exactly. think that being aware that it is a trap is the first sort of step of just being like, OK, this feels like a trap because it is a trap. This feels crappy because it is. then, right. And then you can sit down and sort of, you know,

Ellen Whitlock Baker (35:55.372)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Which is good to know, I think. Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (36:09.026)

Yeah. Yep.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (36:13.804)

Yep. And it's not your fault.

Sarah Jaffe (36:20.208)

I mean, middle management, it's kind of weird to give this sort of classic union advice, but you can kind of power map your workplace. Go, okay, who's above me that's making my life miserable? Who's beneath me that is probably even more miserable than me if I'm a middle manager, right? What can I do for myself? What can I do for my employees? What can I do with the other middle managers depending on how many there are, right? Because I mean, that's the other thing about nonprofits is often they're quite small. And often you have a small staff doing

Ellen Whitlock Baker (36:26.03)

Mm.

Sarah Jaffe (36:48.578)

million things and always trying to do more with less. You might not have an HR department, not that HR departments are really there to help the workers. They're mostly there to help the bosses avoid lawsuits. But you might not even have an HR department, right? You might be the only middle manager. You might be the one person. Yeah, might be the one. Yeah, you might be the one person between the, you know, sort of rank and file employees and the ultimate boss.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (36:58.018)

I know. Yep.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (37:04.354)

Or you outsource it to a firm, which is totally...

Sarah Jaffe (37:15.942)

and you're feeling stuck in that way. And like, you I think this is, it's been interesting to watch sort of my generation of people and I'm, you know, I'm 45 now. So like, yeah, a lot of the middle and upper managers in a lot of places are now my age. And, you know, maybe you have a, right? Yeah, no. And it's like, maybe you've got a mortgage. Maybe you've got a couple of kids. Maybe you're trying to, you know, pay for whatever thing you might be doing. Maybe your kids are in college. God.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (37:29.728)

Exactly. Yeah. That's our listener base. Hello everyone. Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (37:42.577)

and you're trying to pay for that, right? Maybe your health insurance premium is about to triple, right? Yeah, exactly. Like these things are real and you get stuck. And the answer to that is it's just not a problem you can solve by yourself, which is why I'm sort of advocating like Power Map your workplace. Who are the people who are on your level, who you can get together with and be like, how do we change this? Who are the people who are maybe beneath you, who you're like, well, I can't be part of a union because I'm managing, I'm management, but.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (37:44.77)

And you need health insurance. Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (38:12.334)

why don't you guys? How can you think about structures that can actually change the workplace for the better? Because it's not enough to just be miserable and try to sort of solve it all by yourself. Do you have friends in other workplaces that are similar, that are in similar positions in a different place that you can talk to, that you can, you know, I think the solution is

Ellen Whitlock Baker (38:15.374)

So interesting.

Sarah Jaffe (38:40.27)

always, always like, how many other people can I pull together to fix this? It's not what can me individual person do to magically make it all better? Because the answer is like, not much. But what can we all do to make it better? Maybe a lot. What can we all do politically to get some of these weights off our back? You know, like there are just a lot of complicated, messy questions to ask.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (38:53.44)

Right. Well, and it's, yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (39:10.192)

But having a real sense of like, these are positions of power on one hand and positions of real limitation on the other. And being able to be honest about both of those things is hard.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (39:17.102)

No, I don't.

Mm-hmm. They're so hard.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (39:26.892)

Yes. And so that honesty though, think that's really what people can do is educate themselves on, I hear someone delivering goods out there. God, I love London. Wish I was with you. But like, you...

Sarah Jaffe (39:39.846)

Yep. Yeah, exactly. All the delivery guys are out there. Mm-hmm. It is the best.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (39:51.832)

There's all this stuff wrapped up in it is like this white supremacist culture where we feel like we should, like, especially as white women, we can like fix things and like, we can't. It is this system that's so big, but it, does take these like little realizations. And I think like your step one was just be aware that you're not, it's not a great environment and it's not built to be great. It's built to make people money.

Sarah Jaffe (40:11.954)

Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (40:21.28)

or be a tax shelter. And I think that's such a huge realization. people are kind of afraid to sit, like we were talking about earlier, they're sort of afraid to say it out loud. Cause like, my God, will you think I'm a communist or something? Which is so silly. A hundred percent, a hundred percent. Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (40:23.236)

Right? Yes. Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (40:34.204)

Well, it's the worst things to be. There are worse things to be. like, yeah, think there's just, again, I think there are more and more people who are getting to this place now and going like, and again, I think the sort of gross metaphor of the frog in the boiling water, right? And the slowly heating water of capitalism, right, has been the thing that we've been in our whole lives.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (40:55.97)

Yeah, yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (41:04.23)

And it slowly heats up and slowly heats up and slowly heats up. then like in, you know, gosh, just in my adult life, there have been like several moments where you can see it sort of the heat gets cranked up, right? So September 11th, right? I was in undergrad, heat gets cranked up. Financial crisis, I was in grad school. I have excellent timing, y'all. Right, the heat gets cranked up. But what happens in those moments when like things get sort of much worse very quickly?

Ellen Whitlock Baker (41:16.92)

Yeah, yep. Yep.

Sarah Jaffe (41:32.882)

is it becomes visible. You realize that the heat has been cranked up and you realize it because you're seeing it happen to lots of people. So, you know, if you are like my parents underwater on your house in 1995, most of America's doing okay, you feel like it's your fault. You become like my dad.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (41:35.554)

You see it. Yeah. Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (41:53.036)

Yeah, yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (41:54.255)

you feel like I screwed up. I bought a house that was too big and I screwed up at work and I don't have enough money to pay this mortgage. You're underwater on your mortgage in 2009 and so is half of America, right? And the world. And it's a different story when you look around and go like, this is like front page news on the New York Times or the local newspaper if you still have one of those every day because it's a global crisis that wasn't caused by you.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (41:58.019)

Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (42:06.786)

Totally. Totally.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (42:21.688)

Mm-hmm.

Sarah Jaffe (42:23.674)

no matter how much they tried to blame it on individual people buying mortgages. It just, when you watch it happening to everyone, you realize it's not your fault. And COVID, right? When you just, I remember that first, because I'm a labor journalist, I have to look at jobs numbers and that first set of jobs numbers after the pandemic would have just like went straight, line went straight up because so many people had been laid off. Right now,

Ellen Whitlock Baker (42:32.451)

Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (42:39.95)

Mm.

Sarah Jaffe (42:48.828)

You're in another one of those crises. The last or two months ago's job numbers were the worst since COVID, layoffs, right? And this is all uncertainty because of everything from deporting tons of people to laying off a bunch of federal workers and then panicking and hiring them all back. And God, we haven't even talked about the public sector, public sector as such right now, but like that's been an absolutely thankless nightmare if you're an American public worker in the last year. It's been absolutely bonkers.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (42:50.594)

Mm-hmm.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (42:55.554)

Yeah. Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (43:09.089)

Yeah, I know.

Sarah Jaffe (43:18.674)

But what happens in those moments, and again, I think the public workers in the last year are actually a great example because you've seen these organizations of federal workers. So like the Federal Unionist Network, there are other groups of workers in the public sector who have gotten together and made sort of a big public fuss about this and said, like, this is horrible. You shouldn't be doing this to us. Also, by the way, the work that we do affects all of you.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (43:42.702)

Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (43:46.181)

I think the, you know, watching the federal workers sort of speak out and tell you what they do. it's like, people who like, you know, I talked to one young woman who worked for the park service, who does like repairs on buildings on national park sites, which, by the way, includes the White House. That is technically a national park site. This. God, yeah, I. Anyway, not the kind of public sector jobs I wanted to talk about, but thinking about it like this.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (44:02.51)

Getting a big repair right now.

Sarah Jaffe (44:17.85)

this defense of the work that they're doing, they had to do, they still sort of end up having to perform like we love our jobs. And it's like, you don't have to love it to say that this is a really important thing that we need to have it keep going. the, you know, veterans administration, healthcare is really important. I would like that to continue to exist. Whether or not the workers in it have to say how much they love doing it, right? It's a really incredible health service that actually we should all have access to something like it.

It did a lot of reporting on the VA during COVID and I'm now like not just Medicare for all, but actually VA care for all because the VA is an incredible institution. But that's a sideline really. But what you see is again, the realization that like this isn't our fault. If you're laying off tens of thousands of public sector workers all at once, it's not because you didn't love your job enough, right? It's not because you weren't good at

Ellen Whitlock Baker (44:58.904)

All good.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (45:13.268)

Yes!

Sarah Jaffe (45:14.918)

being a nurse or being a park ranger or whatever, right? Being a statistician, you know, any number of things, right? Being a, you know, labor, I talk to people at the Labor Department whose job it is to find out if employers are being awful to their employees in various ways. know, workplace safety inspectors, like all of those people. The FDA, right? The people who make sure that the medicine you're taking is not going to kill you.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (45:37.355)

FDA, like what are you putting in your mouth? Like, yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (45:43.389)

Those kinds of things, yeah, kind of important. yeah, and so watching this massive crisis happen on a mass level is, it does sort of make it possible to see the structural rather than the personal of it all.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (45:46.755)

Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (46:02.38)

Yeah, it does. I think that's so interesting when you talk about your parents being underworn in the mortgage. That's such a visual for me to understand the power of things happening to a lot of people at the same time. mean, COVID's a great example of that. When something happens to all of us at once, it sort of levels the playing field in a weird way of like, now we understand.

I think that's such a good point. And we've had so many of those experiences. I'm the same age as you. So it's like, you know, we've lived through a lot of these at this point. And so they are a rallying cry as much as they are horrible, you know, but that from the ashes, I guess, comes this sort of understanding, right?

Sarah Jaffe (46:45.276)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, right. I think that's the real story. And From the Ashes is fewer chapters that are longer. And in that book, I'm looking at state violence, immigration, deindustrialization, COVID, and climate change as issues that are actually

Ellen Whitlock Baker (46:59.789)

Thank

Sarah Jaffe (47:10.428)

broadly about grief. And in some of those cases, it's obvious, right? If somebody gets killed by a police officer or something, that is obvious. You're grieving the person that has died, right? But deindustrialization? Well, people are also, as we've been talking about, grieving loss of jobs, grieving loss of identity created by those jobs. Particularly when we're talking about industrial jobs that, yeah, you weren't expecting to have fun at them, but they gave you a sense of identity and meaning and

Ellen Whitlock Baker (47:28.792)

That's huge, huge.

Sarah Jaffe (47:39.891)

even like masculinity, right? Like what does it mean to be a man if you can't get the kind of job that allows you to support your family? And like, look, I don't want to go back to 1945, but I get that people are feeling a sense of loss around that. That is not...

Ellen Whitlock Baker (47:45.806)

provide. Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (47:57.282)

Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (48:03.364)

It's not just like to be hand waved away. And when I was thinking about immigration, I was thinking about the story that we hear from the Donald Trumps and Stephen Millers of the world is that all these people just desperately want to come to the US because the US is so amazing and wonderful. And there are some things, something getting all of these benefits, like, dude, citizens don't even get benefits in the US, let alone people who've recently immigrated, who get basically nothing.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (48:06.882)

No.

Sarah Jaffe (48:30.244)

And I was just thinking about the stories of what people are leaving behind. Because a lot of people who end up coming to the States, know, there's a really gross story in the New York Times the other day trying to scapegoat Somali migrants in Minneapolis. That just made me really angry because I know a lot of folks in that community and they're incredible. Yeah, mean, I, you know, one of the, yeah, one of the folks that I, that I profile for in From the Ashes is, you know,

Ellen Whitlock Baker (48:34.455)

Hmm.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (48:45.858)

They've been really losing lately. The New York Times has not been doing great lately.

Sarah Jaffe (48:59.522)

He's a now he's an Uber driver in Minneapolis. When I first talked to him a couple of years ago, he was working at Amazon and he came from Somalia. He had was fleeing war that, by the way, who was bombing Somalia? We were. And, you know, he had built this whole life for himself and his family. And at the end of our conversation, when we were talking about, you know, all sorts of things. And at the end, I was just like, you know, how are you doing?

you know, whatever, just kind of making small talk. And he was like, I actually just got back from Somalia for the first time since I left. And my wife and my children are staying there because they want, and we want them to grow up in their community and to understand. And he's came back to the States alone to work, to make enough money, to send them to private school, because like, you know, we've kind of helped destroy the state as such. So he has to pay to send them to school. And so he's living on his own in Minneapolis working.

you know, constantly in the gig economy to be able to support his kids in the country that he would like to also go back to. You know, it's not like, everybody wants to come to America because it's just a great place to take advantage of it. It's like, actually, it's a great place to be taken advantage of. But the margin of money you can make means a lot in a place like Somalia. Yeah. So, you know, it's it's like that story. And what is he missing? What is he grieving every

Ellen Whitlock Baker (50:06.636)

Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (50:14.454)

Yeah. Yeah. It's still higher. Yeah. Ugh.

Sarah Jaffe (50:27.516)

day that he goes home alone and his wife and kids are now somewhere else. And this guy, he's so great. And Mohammed Mir is his name. And every time he talks about his wife, he says, my beautiful wife, my beautiful wife. And you're just like, right, this guy is living apart from his beautiful wife and his kids and working, doing service work for the people of the US that we are profoundly ungrateful for. And

Ellen Whitlock Baker (50:31.886)

Hmm.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (50:37.054)

And you're not with her.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (50:51.65)

Yeah, yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (50:53.422)

Yeah, and like, where is that story in the, you know, and Donald Trump probably wants to deport him too. you know.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (50:56.611)

Yeah.

All right, yeah.

that just, there's this thing that you talk about in the book, not this thing, but you talk about in the book that someone told you, I think, when you were grieving your father, you have to feel it. And if you don't, it's gonna come out in ways you don't want it to, which is so true. We talk about that a lot on this podcast, because like, we are trained not to feel these things.

Sarah Jaffe (51:14.502)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (51:31.022)

and to like numb ourselves out by capitalist things, honestly, like shopping and eating and watching movies and like there's this, it's all sort of weirdly combined, but what helped you feel it and like acknowledge, cause it sucks to feel it, you know? But like, what can we all do to sort of say, I need to,

Sarah Jaffe (51:50.202)

Yeah. Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (52:00.002)

This is how I can, because we have to train ourselves to do that because we're not used to it.

Sarah Jaffe (52:02.898)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, I'm still not great at it. I still also bury myself in work. I, you know, I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to like let myself just like sit by myself and feel what I need to feel and be sad when I'm sad. Yeah, not, right, and not...

Ellen Whitlock Baker (52:08.962)

Yeah. Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (52:21.058)

and not do with something at the same time. Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (52:28.402)

not have to perform happy for people, you know, because I would do this thing where I would go out and I would just like surround myself with people because I needed to not be alone with my feelings because that was terrifying. And then I would just be surrounded by people and I would be miserable in the middle of it and I would be like pretending to smile and I look at pictures of myself from then and I would just see in my eyes that I was not okay. And

Ellen Whitlock Baker (52:32.142)

you

Ellen Whitlock Baker (52:43.032)

Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (52:58.992)

Being able to say to people, I'm not OK right now is terrifying. And to know when you're wallowing versus when it's OK to ask for help to say, need to feel this and I need also I could use somebody to sit with me.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (53:21.742)

Yeah, just be with me. You talk about sitting sh- Shiva, too, with the-

Sarah Jaffe (53:24.868)

Yeah, that's exactly where I was just going to go. Yeah, it's a sort of lovely Jewish tradition of, the first week after someone dies, you sit shiva and you cover all the mirrors in your house because you're not supposed to worry about shallow things like what you look like. And you basically leave the door open for guests and people come and they sit with you for as long as they can. And there are sort of rules around like you're not supposed to force people to talk. You're supposed to just sit.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (53:41.294)

you

Sarah Jaffe (53:54.041)

And if they want to talk to you, they will. And if they don't, they don't. And you bring food, obviously, because we're the Jews. We like to feed people. And you show up with all of this awareness that where you're coming is a house of mourning. And you are going to be there for that, but that it's not about you. And my friend, Dania, who was somebody that helped me really get through all of this stuff, she told me a story about someone she knew who like,

Ellen Whitlock Baker (54:02.072)

Yes!

Sarah Jaffe (54:23.78)

after of course the first week, because the other thing about grief is that like, it'll come for you when it feels like coming for you, whether you like it or not. And it's not always in that first week or that first month or that first year. You know, she said a friend of hers would just sort of say like, I'm sitting Shiva today, which just meant like, I'm grieving and this is, yeah. And that became, and I was like, that's lovely. yeah, I would love to, you know, sort of be able to do that.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (54:29.837)

Yeah, yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (54:40.972)

Sarah Jaffe (54:53.342)

And, you know, it's now been seven years since my father died. And I still, it kicks my ass sometimes. And there are other things that are kicking my ass. You know, I look out at the world, I look at what's happened in Gaza, the name of my people, which is horrifying and is its own kind of sort of traumatic grief to sit with and deal with. And also just to, again, to be like this at the end of the day, this isn't about me.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (54:53.933)

Hmm.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (55:02.24)

Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (55:22.93)

And there's the smaller personal things of missing my friend Joshua who died this year, whose work and brain I'm so used to being able to think with. And I can't just write him an email and be like, hi, I'm thinking of this thing and I want to talk about it with you because he's gone. And all I've got is the books, which are great books, but we're just going to, because I miss him. Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (55:28.654)

Mm-hmm.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (55:33.836)

Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (55:45.678)

We'll link them in the show notes so you all can buy them. I want to read them too.

Sarah Jaffe (55:50.671)

Yeah, he was the best. He was the best. you know, and just all of these things that I'm, you know, I just moved out of the city that I was living in that I loved. And I was living in New Orleans for the last four years. And now I'm in London and I love London, but I'm also sad to leave New Orleans and I'm sad for the state of the US and being kind of afraid to go back. And all of these things that we're carrying around that sometimes I joke with one of my friends and like, how do I contain this much emotion and not explode?

Ellen Whitlock Baker (56:04.707)

How nice.

Sarah Jaffe (56:20.998)

But the way you do that is by letting yourself not have to sort of contain it, I think. It is finding ways to, yeah, finding ways to express it in some ways, to let it out, to not be afraid to show it. And maybe not to everyone, right? Because like your workplace is notoriously not a particularly grief-friendly place. But...

Ellen Whitlock Baker (56:21.036)

Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (56:29.132)

Yeah. Yeah, being okay to not be okay.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (56:35.683)

Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (56:46.414)

You're right.

Sarah Jaffe (56:47.846)

the people who love you and you will sort of find out who that is when you go through a loss, the people who can handle it and the people who can't. I was just joking about like the kind of people who can.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (56:53.868)

Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (57:04.91)

deal with all of my sadness, but then like are kind of uncomfortable with me being happy. And then the people who can only sort of deal with me when I'm happy. And, you know, we all have like the fun friends versus the people that you actually call when you're you're really struggling and knowing. Knowing how to ask is something I can't say that I'm great at still. But I'm getting better and.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (57:10.639)

interesting.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (57:30.2)

Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (57:33.934)

I love the sitting shit, but like just being able to say to your, it's like a code word to your friends of like, I'm in this space today. Come over if you want or text or call or whatever. That's really beautiful.

Sarah Jaffe (57:36.561)

Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (57:47.376)

Yeah, yeah, I love it. I love it. Need to do more of it.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (57:51.947)

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I love it so much. I can't believe we're like at time already. I wanted to ask you, do you have like a couple more minutes? I want, I wanted to ask you about, you were talking about nurses earlier and I've worked with a bunch of nurses and the White House has just declared many of those kinds of jobs that women traditionally do, nurses, care workers, et cetera, as not professional.

Sarah Jaffe (57:58.931)

Yeah, sure.

Sarah Jaffe (58:04.826)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (58:19.95)

classified. What is that about? and what, when you're in those professions, that sucks.

Sarah Jaffe (58:21.254)

Mm-hmm.

Sarah Jaffe (58:25.508)

You know, it sucks. It sucks. It's not an accident that Trump's first executive order on coming back into office was like men are men and women are women, right? And that trans people don't exist. And that now they're doing things like, well, these gendered jobs are not real serious jobs. It's like they are trying to shove us back in 1945, where you only have two options, right?

Ellen Whitlock Baker (58:36.534)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (58:55.038)

And in doing that, right, like declaring that these are not professions, there's like a whole bunch of classed and raced discussions about what is skilled work and what is, and gendered obviously, discussions about what is skilled work and what is work at all that have been swirling around all of these professions forever. Nursing in particular has a lot of immigrant workers in it. It is actually

Ellen Whitlock Baker (59:20.308)

Mm-hmm.

Sarah Jaffe (59:22.502)

decently, although not great paid in the US because there's constant nursing shortages because it's exhausting. I have spent a lot of, I have done a lot of, lot of, a lot of reporting on nurses and nurses unions. Shout out to my folks at University Medical Center in New Orleans who are in the middle of bargaining their first union contract and have gone on several strikes in the last couple of years to get management to get its

Ellen Whitlock Baker (59:29.186)

Yeah, yeah, it burns them out so quickly.

Sarah Jaffe (59:51.421)

together. And University Medical Center used to be or it's built on sort of the ashes of Charity Hospital, which never reopened after Hurricane Katrina. So this is a public safety net hospital. And these nurses love their city and their work. And they are like, please hire more people. So we are not completely burned out all the time. And please pay us decently and please give us decent health insurance. And you know,

Ellen Whitlock Baker (59:52.899)

Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (01:00:21.658)

whatever kinds of fights over professionalism, because sometimes professionalism is sort of invoked to say you shouldn't have a union because you're professionals, right? And that's been very true in both nursing and teaching and sort of contention within nurses and teachers' organizations of whether they're going to call themselves unions or professional organizations and whether they're going to do things like go on strike or whether they're going to sort of nicely lobby. So I don't...

Ellen Whitlock Baker (01:00:30.188)

Yeah, yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (01:00:50.972)

feel particularly attached to fighting over whether something is professional. But when you look at Trump doing it, it is A, because they don't want to have to fund student loans, and B, it's another screw you women, you're not real. You're not real workers. You're not serious. You're not whatever. Go home and have babies, because that is what they want us to do. Many other executive orders and various other things. And abortion bans, right? That we have to understand these pieces as all connected.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (01:01:13.73)

Yes. Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (01:01:20.838)

Both my PhD and my next book are about how heterosexuality is broken. So I'm thinking a lot about gender and how these things are constituted through the workplace. So when 90 % of nurses are still women.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (01:01:21.069)

Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (01:01:27.191)

Interesting.

Sarah Jaffe (01:01:36.261)

And also, by the way, male nurses get paid more even though they are only 10 % of the profession, because that's a thing. What is being a nurse telling us about what it means to be a woman and what is being a woman telling us about what it means to be a nurse? And this is connected to banning healthcare for trans kids. This is connected to trying to union bus teachers unions. This is connected to Roe v. Wade falling.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (01:01:40.184)

The fuck?

Sarah Jaffe (01:02:04.08)

These things are all attempts to control what we can do with our bodies and our lives. And to control how we do that in the workplace to better exploit us. And also to control us doing all of the free labor in the home that we still do. yeah, so it's really, really important, I think, to see all of these things as connected, to see the devaluing of this kind of work.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (01:02:10.879)

Yeah, yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (01:02:17.853)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, don't stop doing that.

Sarah Jaffe (01:02:31.556)

as related to the devaluing of the lives of trans kids. And to say that these are attacks on our ability to move through the world.

fat require in among other things like economic freedom. Those are not separate issues. And it's really, really frustrating for me when I hear people talk about like, this is a distraction from the real thing and this is a distraction. No, it's not. It is the point. The point is giving white men back all the power so that they can continue to have all the power because by the way, who are the richest people in the world? They're all white men or the people who are married to them. So

Ellen Whitlock Baker (01:03:01.928)

It's connected. Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (01:03:06.785)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (01:03:14.842)

You know, this sense of, right, it's all about consolidating the wealth at the top. And the last plug I'm going to make before I, you know, whatever is like, Melinda Cooper's work on the family as a sort of place to consolidate assets is really, really incredible. Her book, Family Values and Counterrevolution and various articles that she's written about sort of asset protection.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (01:03:15.181)

Although.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (01:03:23.66)

Yes!

Sarah Jaffe (01:03:43.42)

through the family in the private home. Yeah, she's absolutely brilliant and fantastic. So that's a recommendation for one of many ways to think about how all this stuff is connected. I always do. I love to pay it forward. If you're going to talk to me about my book, I'm going to recommend five other people's books. And since you're recommending my book in the bookshop, I feel like I should definitely be paying this forward. Amazing.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (01:03:44.046)

Ellen Whitlock Baker (01:03:49.166)

You've given so many. Yeah. Good.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (01:04:00.46)

I like to do the same.

I did. I got her to buy it. And she was in like some sort of wealth management, like some, and she was so miserable. And I told, I, yeah, I told her about my podcast and was like, just find it and listen to it. Cause I'm going to have Sarah on and who knows? So if you're out there, woman, I met in San Francisco, reach out. Thank you. And I'm, you know, no.

Sarah Jaffe (01:04:12.148)

wow. She should also read Melinda Cooper. Yeah.

great. Amazing. Hello! Thank you for buying my book. I hope your job doesn't make you too miserable, but also, you know, maybe help destroy it.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (01:04:32.064)

Yes. And like that's, I'm so happy to have had you on because I do. I didn't know a lot of this before I started talking to more experts this past year, reading or these books like, and really starting to put the pieces together. it's so all related. And that's why I really love your books because you give that historical perspective with the facts of why.

You know, we are where we are and, and the connections that were not necessarily, if all we're relying on is media, you're not going to make those connections, you know, especially depending on what media you're looking at.

Sarah Jaffe (01:05:09.724)

Yeah. Yeah. well, the one other thing that I was just thinking about was the Bret Stevens, did women ruin the workplace? Or was it Rostow thought, anyway, whatever, the New York Times, one of those reactionary jerks, right? And I was like, I want to ruin the workplace. I'm trying to ruin the workplace. I'm really hoping to ruin the workplace, actually. Yes, we have not ruined the workplace enough, but I would like us to keep trying.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (01:05:16.302)

Please, yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (01:05:20.77)

That's what I was saying earlier when I was like, New York Times, come on. Yeah, let's burn it down. Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (01:05:34.722)

Yeah, I love that. And one of the things you just said is like, you know, I talk so much to people who are like, what can I do? Me, little old me. You can hype other people who are doing good work, just like you just did multiple times during this podcast. Particularly, I find women of color whose voices are just not included in those, you know, top 10.

like leadership and management books of all time. They're all white dudes and they're like 25 years old and like, sure, Patrick Lencioni, I'm sure he said some great things. No offense to him. Yeah, he's like, it's the five dysfunctions of a team and it's like one of the top management books of all time. And people still, what drives me nuts is that we're still quoting him and we're still quoting, you know, the Adam Grant's and the Simon Sinek's and who are fine and say good things. And I appreciate the fact, but

Sarah Jaffe (01:06:04.914)

Yep.

Sarah Jaffe (01:06:10.822)

No idea who that is.

Sarah Jaffe (01:06:16.188)

God. Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (01:06:30.449)

Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (01:06:30.83)

talk about others, but why aren't we going out of our way to find those voices that we haven't heard from and that tell those stories that we need to hear from other people's perspectives? I think that that I'm learning so much. just speaking of which there's this great book called Uncompete Out Right Now by Ruchika Malhotra and her whole

Sarah Jaffe (01:06:37.83)

Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (01:06:55.801)

Mm-hmm.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (01:06:58.818)

Her whole premise is that like women are taught to compete with each other and that there's not enough pie. There's enough pie. And as we band together, we're actually stronger. And she gives some really beautiful examples of how even in her own life, she's learned to radically accept when another woman succeeds, it doesn't mean she's failed, but we're sort of taught that. so there's this

Sarah Jaffe (01:07:02.95)

Yeah. Yeah. Yep.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (01:07:27.95)

And I see that in your books and how you work too. So there's so much to take out of this conversation, Sarah. I feel really hopeful. I mean, sad and like frustrated and all the things, but there's so much hope in this building community, rallying together, finding other people. You said power mapping. love that concept. So I'm ending this on a hopeful note, which is that there's a lot we can be doing right now.

Sarah Jaffe (01:07:34.054)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (01:07:52.999)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And there are a lot of great people who are working on this. And since you said women of color, I want to lift up one more before I go. My friend Samira Mukhopadhyay, who used to be the executive editor at Teen Vogue and wrote a wonderful book called The Myth of Making It. So yeah, she is incredible. She's a legend. And yeah, so that's one of many things that is worth doing.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (01:08:10.734)

my gosh, I love her book.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (01:08:16.524)

Yeah, I love that book.

Sarah Jaffe (01:08:22.072)

you can edit this out but do know when this is going up because I am doing a zoom event thing on the 9th with another person who wrote a book about the workplace but if this is going to go up after that then I won't bother mentioning.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (01:08:33.758)

It will go up in like January. So not for a bit, but mention away. It's funny cause Samita, I reached out to her to be on the podcast like a long ago. Not that I mean, it's only been a year, but I'm like, I have five followers. Would you like to be on my podcast? And I didn't hear back, but she's definitely someone I would love to interview because she has such a good perspective.

Sarah Jaffe (01:08:36.336)

Okay, that's fine then. Yep. That's cool. Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (01:08:53.594)

Yeah. Yeah, well.

Chaser again, sometimes things just disappear into the inbox, you It's worth it. Yeah, yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (01:09:01.814)

I know I'll grab her again. okay, I'll go back to. So Sarah, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I really appreciate it and learned so much.

Sarah Jaffe (01:09:10.864)

Yeah. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It's been fun.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (01:09:15.51)

Yeah, everybody go buy Sarah's books and all of the other ones that she recommended today. All right. I know, but the listening. So what I plug, you read your own book, at least for From the Ashes, because I listened to it and it's so nice to hear it in the author's voice. So it's a lovely way to learn if you're not like going to sit down and read a book lately.

Sarah Jaffe (01:09:20.306)

So many bucks.

Sarah Jaffe (01:09:29.468)

Mm-hmm. Yep.

Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (01:09:36.422)

Yeah. Audio books are real books. The person who writes them say so. And yes, I recorded the audio book for both Work Won't Love You Back and From the Ashes. So if for some reason you're enjoying my voice, you can hear a lot more of it. Yeah.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (01:09:40.846)

100 %!

Ellen Whitlock Baker (01:09:47.254)

nice. I think it's so good.

Your voice is great. And I think when the author reads it, you really, especially when you've got memoir aspects in it, like you just get this tonality. I was just noticing that like that you maybe don't get from reading it, but the way that you are, you know, you know why you put those words on the page. So it's like this really special anyway plug for audio books, but thank you so much, Sarah and good luck with your PhD and enjoy being in the country with healthcare.

Sarah Jaffe (01:09:57.572)

Mm hmm. Yeah.

Sarah Jaffe (01:10:09.148)

Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you.

it's a wonderful thing. It's a wonderful thing. Thanks.

Ellen Whitlock Baker (01:10:20.939)

It is, it is. Well, thank you so much and we will see you soon. Thanks everyone for listening. Oops.

Sarah Jaffe is a Type Media Center Fellow and an independent journalist covering the politics of power, from the workplace to the streets. She is the author of Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone and Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the New Republic, the American Prospect, and many other publications. She is the cohost, with Michelle Chen, of Dissent magazine's Belabored podcast, as well as a columnist at The Progressive and New Labor Forum.

Ellen Whitlock Baker
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Season 2, Episode 2: Why Trust at Work Is Breaking Down — and How Rebuilding It Changes Everything— with Minda Harts