Raw Deal
How the "Uber Economy" and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
"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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Companies such as Uber, Airbnb, and TaskRabbit promote the idea that their employees enjoy a lifestyle of flexible hours and financial freedom. But Hill's (Europe's Promise) scathing critique of this vision will give readers pause before checking their smartphones for their next vacation rental or ride to the airport, as he develops the image of a well-educated Uber driver earning less than minimum wage while her bedroom is Airbnb'd to a tourist. Unfortunately, instead of focusing on delivering a solid critique of the labor practices in the sharing, or "share the crumbs," economy, Hill throws in some extraneous material about robots replacing workers, black markets, and Keynesian economic policy. Sturm und Drang sits in for concise reasoning, as Hill decries "the mortal spiral that America is spinning around, like a marble rolling around a gravity well." In such moments of lumbering polemic, the book obfuscates its more important thesis: the need for a new kind of labor movement that can meet the innovation of the sharing economy with an equally bold vision for fair, decent, and well-paying work and a portable social safety net that will benefit freelancers, temps, and "solopreneurs" everywhere.