Long gone are the days when employers felt an ethical business obligation to hire directly employees to work for them; of which, that particular business would do its level best to not ever lay anybody off, and took tremendous pride in adhering to that principle, as well as the company making it their policy to pay their employees a fair salary with fair benefits, along with also promoting from within, and finally providing to those employees some reasonable degree of profit sharing. It used to be that for many middle-class families that they could really count on their employer providing them with the security of a true living wage, that was good enough, to allow the purchase of a home, and to raise a family, with some reasonable degree of certainty that as long as the employees did their part, that the company would do theirs.
Nowadays, it’s all about money, money, and more money – of which the primary driving force for some of America’s biggest and most powerful corporations is to do what needs to be done to grow, to take market share, to increase profits, and most especially to personally profit those that are in upper management, above all -- as well as keeping satisfied the investors in that company. When a given company has no real moral compass, except to do what needs to be done in order to increase profits and revenue, it is then very easy for that company to do everything in its power to augment those two very things, at the expense of doing right by their own employees and humanity, in general.
For instance, companies don’t need to worry about the negative publicity of layoffs, if they make it their point not to hire directly those that can be utilized instead in a subcontracting capacity. Further to the point, for any business that has a seasonal aspect to it, the parent company doesn’t need to worry about ramping up or ramping down, as long as they have successfully passed that responsibility on to the subcontractor that they have engaged to specifically address what they need to accomplish on behalf of the company, which therefore means that those subcontractors will do whatever that it is that they need to do. Additionally, fair labor practices and environmental concerns will perpetually take a backseat when that work has been subcontracted to an outside agency, mainly because there are a lot of subcontractors in an increasingly smaller world, that are foreign based, and therefore subject only to their nation’s foreign laws; additionally, even those that are subcontracted domestically, will never be the personal responsibility of the company issuing the subcontract, but rather it is the subcontractor that has the responsibility to honor the terms of a given contract, not the contractor.
Finally, anytime work is subcontracted, the parent company can exert an enormous amount of pressure for that work to be done per the dictates that they so demand, or else that subcontractor is in danger of losing not only that business but also future business. This ability to boss subcontractors around, signifies that to a very large extent, the hurdles, the problems, and the difficulties that subcontractors have to overcome, are their responsibility and their responsibility, alone; meaning that those employees that are so employed by those subcontractors are obviously going to have to bear the brunt of whatever needs to be done, while typically receiving peanuts in return, while the contractor, on the other hand, essentially ends up living very, very large.