Lost in Work — Amelia Horgan

BOOK REVIEW • "We are encouraged to love our jobs and live the ‘values’ of the companies we work for…this means that when we criticize work, we often come up against fear and confusion.”

I kept seeing this book everywhere so I gave it a read. It’s a pretty good overview of how work exploits us, explicitly and in more subtle ways. Horgan begins with the history of garment workers and goes on to explain the diminishing power of unions and the plight of today’s stale, brand-driven economy. The stories we, as a society, have told ourselves about work and leisure have managed to produce a level of deception that runs disturbingly deep and threatens to take us further into despair.

On a more optimistic note, I really enjoyed the discussion of resistance to work and the small ways in which workers can take back their time and existence. This is an accessible read overall with only a few passages that felt overly academic.