"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.

Introduction.Chapter One. Back to the FutureChapter Two. Airbnb and the Sharing Economy: Economic Savior or...Dead End?Chapter Three. The Ticking Time Bomb of UberChapter Four. TaskRabbit and oDesk's Race to the BottomChapter Five. Underground: The Road to Hell Is Paved with SilkChapter Six. Robots and Techno Sapiens Are Coming for Your JobChapter Seven. The Specter of the Economic Singularity Chapter Eight. The New Economy Visionaries: Leaders Leading Us...Where? Chapter Nine. Labor's DilemmaChapter Ten. Solutions I: A New Social Contract for the New EconomyChapter Eleven. Solutions II: Making the New Economy Work in the Information and Innovation AgeChapter Twelve. Conclusion: Long live Maria Fernandes!NotesAcknowledgementsBibliographyIndex