Like so many of the hundreds of changes instituted in the 1980s, the practice of replacing staff with contract workers was too arcane and tedious for many of the rest of us to care or even know about. But imagine the thousands of companies and cities and schools and cultural institutions all over the country that have delegated so much of this kind of work to contractors, thereby making the treatment of all those eleven-dollar-an-hour workers somebody else’s problem. According to a 2018 study by five major-university economists, a full third of the increase in American income inequality over
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