NYT: Please Don't Call My Job a Calling [View all]

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/opinion/employment-exploitation-unions.html

By Simone Stolzoff

Last month, in an interview about Warner Bros. Discovery’s $50 million streaming profit in the first quarter of 2023, the company’s chief executive, David Zaslav, told CNBC that he believed the Writers Guild of America strike would ultimately end because of “a love for the business and a love for working.”

As the sixth week of the strike begins, the writers’ persistence reveals a sharper truth: Love, unfortunately, doesn’t pay the bills.

The implication that love is a suitable stand-in for job security, workplace protections or fair pay is a commonly held belief, especially in so-called dream jobs like writing, cooking and working in the arts, where the privilege to do the work is seen as a form of compensation itself.

But the rhetoric that a job is a passion or a “labor of love” obfuscates the reality that a job is an economic contract. The assumption that it isn’t sets up the conditions for exploitation.

FULL story at link above.