“[Weeks] convincingly shows how an imperative to be productive, at work, in the home, school and in life generally (’Five Top Tips for Productive Dating Profiles!’), is central to the way capitalism not only puts us to work but makes us want to be put to work. We think work is right and just and when we imagine another world, even a ‘post-revolutionary world’, we imagine a world of work. Weeks argues that we need to break the hold that work has on our imaginations.” — Nicholas Beuret, Red Pepper

“The Problem with Work ... raise[s] key issues for feminism, including the question of whether capitalism can serve the interests of women today and in the future... Th[is book] should be widely read, discussed, and debated...” — Julie P. Torrant, Signs

“There’s no better way to spend the summer months than by thinking about waged labor, which is why I’m currently reading The Problem with Work, an inventive examination of how seemingly reformist measures such as universal basic income and reduced workweeks can be used as stepping stones toward a world beyond the daily grind.” — Frank Reynolds, The Nation

“The Problem with Work . . . is bold for several reasons. Not the least of which is for its fundamental argument that work should be understood as a concern of political theory, that work is a matter of power and domination as much as it is productivity and economics. This academic provocation aside, Weeks’ book is bold in taking up the critique of work, in claiming anti-work politics. In doing so it breaks both with the dominant ideology that makes work a testament to one’s moral worth and with the center-left contestation of this ideology that demands more aggressive jobs programs to put people to work.” — Unemployed Negativity blog

“[T]his is well worth a read, as Weeks presents a set of imaginative and insightful ideas in a clear and thoroughly argued format.” — Ruth Lorimer, Socialist Review

“Faced with the neoliberal fiat that market values now define what is valuable as such, and that now, more than ever, work is the sole aim for which we all must live, Kathi Weeks stares back without blinking and demands something different. She urges readers to insist on less work and more money, and to do so in a self-consciously militant, utopian register. Combining an imaginative critique of neoliberalism’s warp-drive work ethic with a subtle and badly needed recuperation of the utopian as a mode of political theory and action, The Problem with Work makes a vital contribution to feminist theory, Marxist theory, and the growing political-theoretical literature on time and temporality.” — Paul Apostolidis, Theory & Event

“Finally, a well-reasoned and critical treatise on the nature of work has appeared that grapples with the work ethic and wrestles it into submission.” — Right to Be Lazy blog

“Weeks recognizes that what she proposes sounds, perhaps, too good to be true, or too radical ever to reach implementation in contemporary societies. Perhaps one of the most remarkable moves of the book, however, is that Weeks concludes her study not simply by acknowledging the utopian taste her argument may leave in the mouths of some readers, but that she tackles this notion head on through an examination of the psychology and theory of utopia and its links to feminist political imaginaries. The danger, Weeks concludes, is that feminists demand too little rather than too much change, and that a feminist response to the politics of work must be the refusal of work as it is discursively presented to—and constructed for—us and to demand and create alternatives to this normative notion of work.” — Nadine Muller and Claire O’Callaghan, Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

“The book makes a powerful case for radical feminism as the theoretical and political terrain in which the allegedly natural and objective values of work have been most cogently disrespected and demystified…Weeks’s book has the merit of grounding the collapse of capitalist work in terms of forms of life. In so doing, it opens new, possibly unsettling questions on the meaning of life as an activist project.” — Franco Barchiesi, Work, Employment and Society

“What Weeks affords us in her analysis are invaluable theoretical tools for exploring how the abstraction of labour proceeds in not only the practical existence of work, but its political existence…The virtue of Weeks’s treatment is the way in which she situates abstract labour in a radically repoliticized context open to contestation and struggle…” — Frederick H. Pitts, Work, Employment and Society

"[The Problem with Work] is a useful introduction to Marxist thought on work while also critiquing it from a feminist standpoint." — Jennifer Woodruff Tait, Green Room