Marie Cocco @ Truthdig - The challenge of our time is to re-create America as a middle-class nation.

How many of you, having previously held a presumptively secure job with a solid company, are now working as a “contractor” or “consultant”? The trend toward taking employees off the payroll only to hire them again as contractors—without health benefits, pensions, sick days, vacations—began in the 1970s with janitors, construction workers and truckers. Now highly skilled technology workers who helped transform the global economy are among the downsized, the outsourced, the contracted-out.  Read more.