How has automation and deindustrialization changed the nature of work?
For our Fall Books issue, Alyssa Battistoni writes about Aaron Benanav’s Automation and the Future of Work and Sarah Jaffe’s Work Won’t Love You Back. If the pandemic and its downstream effects have, however temporarily and unevenly, emboldened at least some workers to take on the boss, Battistoni notes, Benanav and Jaffe ultimately aim toward more sweeping transformations of work and of society in general.
Neither Aaron Benanav’s Automation and the Future of Work nor Sarah Jaffe’s Work Won’t Love You Back was written with the pandemic in mind but together they serve as an indispensable guide to the broader dynamics of work in the contemporary moment.