Hiring Temporary Employees Versus Permanent Employees

Temporary Employment: Economic Naturalism in Action

From the point-of-view of an employer, hiring temporary employees to fill entry-level positions is highly beneficial to the company's bottom line. Temporary employees can be easily hired and fired if they don't 'work out.' That is, if the temporarily hired employees are not competent, the employers can easily discontinue their worker's residency within the company without making a costly investiture in training the new employees. Also, temporary employees are often obtained through temporary agencies, which may charge a fee but will also initially 'vet' the employees for basic skills such as proficiency at job applications like Microsoft Word, Windows, Excel, etc.

Although a company may have a human resources staff in place that could also strive to ensure a basic level of competency in its entry level staff, the human resources department may be more efficiently deployed and may prefer to channel its energies towards executive-directed position searches. In a small company, human resources personnel may be better utilized in to conducting in-company searches for higher level positions, rather than focusing on entry-level positions that rely upon pure task-based competencies.

Additionally, temporary employees do not have to be recompensed with company-costly healthcare benefits, educational incentives (such as tuition reimbursement), stock options, or retirement benefits (such as IRAs or pension plans) unless they are hired permanently. Economic naturalism argues the view that there is a natural order to the economy. Part of this natural order is rewarding loyal employees with benefits. However, why should a company be forced to train, and to provide benefits for a new employee that may or many not be an asset to the company, over the company's long-term future?

Economic naturalism also argues that any government interventions are necessarily for the worse, thus to cut company costs, to ensure a minimum of company expenditures in seeking employees to fill relatively inconsequential positions, and to keep the level of commitments to employees at a low level until they have shown company loyalties and competencies and qualities that the company is seeking is valid, so long as the government allows a company to behave in this economically feasible fashion. In a free market economy, where all companies are attempting above all to curtail the costs of production (including labor) and to thus increase profits for permanent employees who may be company shareholders, temporary employment is the ideal solution to cut costs, increase profits, and to ensure the maximum rate of return for loyal shareholders and employees.