The Pros and Cons of a Contingent Workforce

A contingent workforce is a temporary group of workers who work for an organization on a non-permanent basis, also known as freelancers, independent professionals, temporary contract workers, independent contractors or consultants. The contingent workforce style of labor is becoming much more popular in the American economy today because of several different contributing factors. The driving force behind the idea of a contingent workforce is globalization. With the world’s economies becoming increasingly intertwined there is rapid growth in most industries. This results in the need for a highly knowledgeable and flexible employee. When a company uses a contract worker they gain these advantages. Another factor that is increasing the popularity of contingent workers in the American economy is the need for expertise. With organizations becoming ever more reliant on the very skilled and highly specialized person to do the job it is not a surprise to see more and more workers becoming independent professionals and working under short term contracts. This leads to the next factor behind the rise in contingent workers, the World Wide Web. With sites such as monster.com providing thousands of available jobs daily to the unemployed it is easy to see how a person might it attractive to be independent of one organization and work short term for multiple companies. The last factor that is making contingent workers a larger percentage of the American economy is the ease of changing employment. Having the ability to easily change from one organization to the next is very appealing to some in today’s workforce, being a temporary employee allows this to take place.
The positive aspects of developing a contingent workforce within a company are as follows:
• With the complexity of employment laws and the high costs associated with them, organizations are finding it to be easier to have workers that are self-employed or employees of other organizations. Employing