Sarah Jaffe: ‘No one wants to admit they’re rich or poor. Everyone wants to think of themselves as middle class’

Sarah Jaffe, 44, knows the world of work and all its variants inside out. She has been a waitress, a bicycle mechanic and a social media consultant; she has scooped ice cream, cleaned up trash and explained Soviet communism to middle schoolers. Her book Work Won’t Love You Back is a slap in the face that opens our eyes to fictions such as “labor of love” and constructs such as the “white working class.” The working class is a concept that is evolving, and which these days takes the shape of immigrant caregivers who are exploited.

The interview takes place at the café of Waterstones bookstore in Piccadilly. Jaffe has recently flown into London (she divides her time between America and Europe), and she is still suffering from jet lag. The American journalist and writer has been specializing in labor issues for almost two decades, but in conversation she covers everything from new jobs to the challenges of the left, the uncertainty that voters still feel about Kamala Harris, and the reaction to the tragedy of Gaza of America’s Jewish community — she herself is the daughter and granddaughter of Central European Jews who fled to the U.S.

Question. Some politicians on the left are already using a convoluted expression, the “working middle class.” What is the working class today?

Answer. If we were to be pedantically Marxist about it, we would say that the working class is made up of all those who have nothing to sell but their labor. But if you are a politician, whether [Britain’s Prime Minister] Keir Starmer or [Republican vice-presidential candidate] J. D. Vance, you want to be able to grab for a voting majority that will identify positively with this thing. Everybody wants to think of themselves as middle class. Nobody likes to admit that they’re rich and nobody wants to admit they are poor.

Q. And that’s why Trump’s candidacy appeals to the myth of a ‘white working class’ that has been left behind?

A. David Roediger, a historian who’s written a lot about this, says that every time you use the term ‘white working class,’ the emphasis will always be on white and the mumbling on the working class part. Today, the fastest growing jobs in a lot of countries are in some form of care work, which is done mostly by women and often by immigrant women, and in the U.S. by Black and brown women. So the working class doesn’t look like a white guy in a hard hat anymore, in the Global North anyway.

Q. Reagan asked voters the question “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” which has become the ultimate electoral test. Even though the economy has improved, Kamala Harris’ candidacy has not taken off.

A. People don’t live in macroeconomic data. Macroeconomic data throws Jeff Bezos into the mix, and Jeff Bezos is doing a lot better than he was 40 years ago. Me, I have more education than anyone in my family. I’m here being interviewed by a journalist from a country I’ve never even been to. Yet I still can’t afford to buy an apartment. We can’t use college degrees as a proxy for class anymore, because there are a lot of people with college degrees working at Starbucks.

Q. You denounce what you call the ‘labor of love’ plot.

A. It’s another self-justifying myth, which goes: if you work hard, you can maybe become a billionaire, but even if you don’t, you can find something that you love doing, and that will be its own success. You know, the cheesiest slogan is “do a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.”

Q. But the response to this labor crisis has been more protectionism…

A. The answer to that developing cycle should be political and combine many factors. I don’t think the answer is let’s start a trade war with China, as Trump intends. What we have to ask ourselves is what do we actually need done as a society? And it turns out that, to a large extent, what we need is a lot of people doing home health care. What decisions are we going to make so that we can actually encourage people to go into that line of work, and pay them fairly for it?

Q. The biggest disillusionment is being felt by young people.

A. We are seeing people disillusioned by a multitude of things. People are disillusioned with relationships. People are disillusioned with politics. There’s certainly disillusion with the workplace. So you see the rise of the far right all over the world, not just Trump.

I’m here being interviewed by a journalist from a country I’ve never even been to. Yet I still can’t afford to buy an apartment

Q. Is the threat from the far right the same all over the world?

A. The Germans scare me the most because I’m Jewish. But I was actually in Italy right before and right after the election, when [Georgia] Meloni got elected, and I asked a friend of a friend what he thought about it. And he was like, ‘Oh, we’re Italian. We’ve been homeopathically ingesting fascism for so long, we’re immune to it.’ I am glad that someone is. But another friend has written about Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and it is scary. Brazil is the closest analog for the U.S., and the U.S. really doesn’t like to admit that, but it’s true, both are very racist, colonial countries with lots and lots of guns.

Q. Are you excited about Kamala Harris’ candidacy then?

A. I have met America, and it is racist and sexist as hell. I think that there are a few things that are hanging around her neck right now. One is Gaza. She does not have the support in particular places that she needs, in Arab communities, in places like Michigan, which has a significant Palestinian and broader Arab population that usually votes Democrat, that are pissed at her because she’s given them nothing. And the campaign ads that I have seen are mostly a list of Republicans who have endorsed her. Telling people that Dick Cheney has endorsed you is going to make more of those voters in Michigan stay home.

Q. The American Jewish community has always been united in its defense of Israel. Have we seen any cracks after Netanyahu’s response to the Hamas massacre on October 7?

A. There is a real split in the Jewish community, partly due to age. Younger people have grown up without the visceral fear of annihilation that people even my dad’s age grew up with. I mean, sure it was a trauma. It’s also a trauma to wipe out at least 40,000 people, and the scale of it is just massively different.

Q. We are once again hearing the arguments that Zionism used in its beginnings: Israel as the last bastion of civilization against barbarism.

A. That’s basically just racism. There’s one thing that fascinates me: the difference between being safe and feeling safe. When the student encampments were going up at universities around the U.S. and students would complain that this made them feel unsafe. The truth is that someone waving a Palestinian flag doesn’t make you unsafe. So when I think about safety, I think about a world where everybody’s needs are matched, not a world where some people live in an open-air prison, because the people building that prison are supposedly like me.

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