“What’s going to happen to my job?”
That’s what an increasing number of anxious Americans are asking themselves.
The
US workforce, which has been one of the most productive and wealthiest
in the world, is undergoing an alarming transformation. Increasing
numbers of workers find themselves on shaky ground, turned into
freelancers, temps and contractors. Even many full-time and professional
jobs are experiencing this precarious shift. Within a decade, a
near-majority of the 145 million employed Americans will be impacted.
Add to that the steamroller of automation, robots and artificial
intelligence already replacing millions of workers and projected to
“obsolesce” millions more, and the jobs picture starts looking grim.
Now
a weird yet historic mash-up of Silicon Valley technology and Wall
Street greed is thrusting upon us the latest economic fraud: the
so-called “sharing economy,” with companies like Uber, Airbnb and
TaskRabbit allegedly “liberating workers” to become “independent” and
“their own CEOs,” hiring themselves out for ever-smaller jobs and wages
while the companies profit.
But this “share the crumbs” economy is just the tip of a looming iceberg that the middle class is drifting toward. Raw Deal: How the “Uber Economy” and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers,by
veteran journalist Steven Hill, is an exposé that challenges
conventional thinking, and the hype celebrating this new economy, by
showing why the vision of the “techno sapien” leaders and their Ayn Rand
libertarianism is a dead end.
In Raw Deal, Steven Hill
proposes pragmatic policy solutions to transform the US economy and its
safety net and social contract, launching a new kind of deal to restore
power back into the hands of American workers.
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