Making our time our own
By Shayna Goodman
In her new book, Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone, labor and economic justice journalist Sarah Jaffe exposes the myth of "love what you do" as a tool of exploitation. Jaffe writes about love and labor. She incroporates the work of feminist scholar Silvia Federici to explain how current working conditions and expectations blur the boundaries between personal time and work time and the home and the work place:
...the home was [understood as the] women’s sphere, the workplace men’s. In reality those lines were always blurred; plenty of women always worked, for one thing, even from the very beginnings of industrial capitalism, and plenty of bosses wanted to extend their control into the home. Henry Ford, for example, famously sent investigators into the homes of his workers to make sure they were upstanding, straight and monogamous, and therefore deserving of higher wages.
One of the great experiences of disillusionment I have experienced in my adult life has been the realization that my time is not my own. My life at home and my personal relationships with romantic partners, friends, and family were not only impacted but framed by the obligation to work. As Jaffe points out, our personal relationships and leisure time are squeezed in around the edges of work. It is therefore a radical act to center relationships and leisure in the form of a day of rest. Observing a weekly day of rest, free from labor, allows us to reclaim our individual concepts of home and its importance in our lives