单项选择题

Passage 3

The rise of "temp" work has further magnified the decreasing rights and alienation of the worker. It is common corporate Practice to phase out full-time employees and hire temporary workers to take on more workload in less time. When facing a pressing deadline, a corporation may pay $15～$20 per hour for a temp worker, but the temp worker will only see $ 7 or $ 8 of that money. The rest goes to temp agency, which is usually a corporate chain, such as Kelly Services, that blatantly makes its profits off other people’s labor. This increases profits of the corporations because they can increase a workload, get rid of the employee when they’re finished, and not worry about paying benefits or unemployment for that employee. I have had to work with temps a few times in my current position, and the workers only want one thing--a full-time job with benefits. We really wanted to hire one temp I was working with, but we could not offer her a full-time job because it would have been a breach in our contract with the temp agency that employed her. To hire a temp full-time, we would have had to pay the agency over a thousand dollars. Through this practice and policy, the temp agency locks its temporary workers into a horrible new form of servitude from which the workers cannot break free. Furthermore, corporate powers push workers to take on bigger workloads, work longer hours, and accept less benefits by instilling a paranoia in their workforce. The capitalist bosses assume dishonesty, disloyalty, and laziness amongst workers, and they breed a sense of guilt and fear through their assumptions. Where guilt doesn’t seep in, bitterness, anger, and depression take over, the highest priorities of Big Business are to increase profits and limit liabilities. Personal relations and human needs are last on their list of priorities. So what we see is a huge mass of people who are alienated, distempered, over- worked, mentally and physically iii and who spend the vast majority of their time and energy on their basic survival. They are denied a chance to really "love", because they are forced to make profits for the capitalists in power.

The word "liabilities" in the last paragraph is closest in meaning to ______.