A firm, during the recession, laid off
most of its staff and hired many of its former employees as contingent workers,
having them work hourly on projects without paying benefits, providing office
space, or having any long-term commitment to them. While that gave these
workers the freedom to work on their own projects, it also increased their
employment insecurity.
What
is the utility of an employer having contingent workers instead of fulltime
employees? The answer to that question has become especially relevant in
today’s economy, where some observers estimate that as much as half of the
workforce could be self-employed in twenty years time.
Clearly,
digital and telecommunications technology has enabled a contingent workforce to
be more productive, whether working in an office or at home, next door or
halfway around the world. At the same time, the globalization of the economy
has pushed employers to reduce the number of fulltime employees in order to
adapt to the unpredictability of global demand and to adjust to the downward
pressure on prices and wages because of global competition.
Hiring
workers just to do particular tasks or work on specific projects with no
long-term employment obligation, however, has its drawbacks as well. It can
negatively affect the quality of the work, the speed with which things get
done, the continuity of co-worker relationships, and even the mutual trust that
makes teamwork possible. What may seem smart from an economic point of view can
become anything but that from an employer or employee perspective.
The
various definitions of “utility” highlight this dilemma. Most commonly equated
with usefulness, utility also refers to someone who can serve as a substitute
for someone else – a utility player on a baseball team, for example – or to
something that is useful but of poor quality – a utility building, for
instance. So, while the widespread use of a contingent workforce has
usefulness, the quality of the work by these substitute employees may never
equal that of those who they replaced.
In
ethics, utility entails doing the greatest good for the greatest number of
people. And as such, the utility of using contingent workers may rest upon the
consequences of doing so for the largest number of clients or consumers. If an
office produces mostly commodity work, repeating relatively standard projects
over and over again, then a contingent workforce might make sense. Even if the
workers themselves might prefer full employment, a strictly utilitarian
calculus would weigh the number of employees affected against the number of
people benefiting from the lower costs of the end product as a result of lower
production costs.
If,
however, a firm does mostly custom work for clients, consumers, or communities
of various sorts, then quality will likely trump price in delivering the
greatest good. In such cases – which constitute the largest percentage of the
work that architects and designers do – contingent workers may not be worth
their lower cost. What an office may gain in terms of lower wages or healthcare
benefits, it can more than lose with lower quality of work and lower
productivity among its workers.
The
other major definition of utility has to do with businesses that perform a
public service subject to special governmental regulation – an electric
utility, for example. While architecture and design offices are not official
utilities, they do perform a public service regulated by such things as
building or zoning codes. As such, they need to focus on the public’s best
interest, which almost certainly does not include the overuse of contingent
workers, whose unstable employment situation also makes them a public burden.
