I am frequently concerned about being laid off. From 1979 through the 2000s, that statement was posed in a regular survey of employees of four hundred big U.S. corporations, each person asked if they agreed or disagreed. In 1982, early in our new national musical chairs game, during a bad recession with high unemployment, only 14 percent of this large sample of workers said they felt anxious about losing their jobs. The number crept upward during the 1980s, and then in the ’90s people finally registered that, uh-oh, our social contract had been completely revamped. By 1995, even though the
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