It is easy for people to forget the mass of contractors that fill the offices of government and business at all levels. These people have zero job security, little or no benefits that, as small as they have become, regular employees still receive, and are all too often living paycheck to paycheck.
These are the people who keep your hospitals’ computers running. The state government doing the jobs that your state legislature has said have to happen but still frozen the hiring and refused to allocate money for — all in the name of budget cutting. The federal government does the jobs that have to be done — but Congress has frozen hiring for, and refused to allocate enough money to hire permanent employees. The people who clean your office, clean your streets, clean your hotels.
All of this has been in the name of “reduced cost”, however, since I have been on both sides of the equation, both hiring contractors and being hired as a contractor. I can say will some confidence, it is not less expensive, period. The costs are different and more apparent in the short term with employee hiring, but the costs with contractors are higher in the long term when I was a manager I argued until I was blue in the face that the savings were illusionary. Every VP and up was too focused on the next month or the next quarter so they couldn’t see that the cost of training the next set of contractors was going to eat the saving many times over. Even training and verifying a new cleaning staff in many places has more costs than the cost of maintaining a permanent employee in the same position. They could never read the long-term costs because the short-term costs paid back to the bottom line they are paid to optimize. So they cost the company in the long-term for short-term gain.
This is all in addition to the human costs of the disposable employee, when you are a contractor there is very little incentive to put in additional work. Especially when told ‘You are only allowed to bill 40 hours per week, no matter how many you work’ so you only ever work exactly 40 hours. Where an employee who is on salary doing the same job may not only be expected but be willing to work 45 or 50 hours when they are finishing thing up. Again, both the employee and the employer loses in our current system of more contractors fewer employees.
