Even as hiring activity remains brisk and more firms spend resources training employees, many American companies are activity planning to hire fewer people in the future. As indicated by writer Lauren Weber, the outsourcing wave that moved thousands of apparel manufacturing jobs to China and dozens of call center operations to India remains just as likely to happen within companies across the U.S. and in virtually every industry.
For instance, the men and women who unload shipping containers at Wal-Mart’s warehouses are supplied by trucking company Schneider National’s logistics operations, which in turn subcontracts with temporary staffing agencies. The pharmaceutical company Pfizer used contractors to perform the majority of its clinical drug trials last year according to The Wall Street Journal.
The contractor model has become so prevalent that the parent company of Google,ranked by Fortune magazine as the best place to work for seven of the past ten years, has roughly as many outsourced workers as full-time employees. The biggest attraction of replacing employees with contract workers is greater control over costs.