Sarah Jaffe is an American journalist and nonfiction author known for writing about labour, politics and power. She is best known for Work Won’t Love You Back (2021) and Necessary Trouble (2016), both published by Bold Type Books. Her third book, From the Ashes (2024), examines grief and political resistance in the context of environmental and economic collapse.
Sarah Jaffe studied English at Loyola University New Orleans. She earned a master's degree in journalism from Temple University in Philadelphia. Before becoming a journalist, Sarah worked in service jobs, including restaurants and bars, and held roles as a waitress, ice cream scooper and bicycle mechanic.
“I worked in the service industry for a long time, where I was expected to perform the love for labour,” she said. She later earned a university degree and a graduate degree, completing unpaid internships and freelance writing to pursue a career in journalism.
She has written for The Guardian, The Nation, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic and In These Times. She is a columnist at The Progressive and a co-host of the Belabored podcast with Michelle Chen. She also co-hosts Heart Reacts, a podcast on collapse and survival under late capitalism.
Her first book, Necessary Trouble (2016), examined the emergence of new protest movements in the United States following the 2008 financial crisis. Her second book, Work Won't Love You Back (2021), critiques the culture of unpaid and underpaid labour in creative and care industries. Drawing on interviews and research, she described how the myth of “loving your work” is used to justify exploitation. “By the time I got out of that job, I had been disabused of the notion that there would be a ‘dream job’ that would rescue me,” she explained.
Her latest book, From the Ashes (2024), continues this political focus but shifts to grief and mourning. Combining reporting and memoir, Jaffe explores how collective grieving becomes a political act in the face of ongoing loss. She argues that the refusal to mourn publicly is part of neoliberal control, and that “when we are able to mourn the lives, the homes, and the worlds we have lost, we are better prepared to fight for a transformed future.”
Jaffe’s work is informed by feminist theory and labour history. She credits thinkers such as Donna Haraway and Silvia Federici and often writes about how gender is constructed through work. “There’s a feminist tradition that looks at the whole structure of the thing,” she said, “and says that workplaces are one of the things that make gender.”
Sarah Jaffe currently lives in New Orleans.
Photo credit: Salam Rizk
