“You’re my favorite headcount…”
-Pointy-haired Boss in Dilbert.
The way it was explained to me - some out-of-touch boffins on Wall Street crunch the data on your company and come up with a number - “this is how many employees you should have.” It was my observation that the number failed to account for sicknesses, vacation, absent days, training on turnover, etc. so following that the business was too lean.
Fortunately, a contractor was not “headcount”. In fact, most contractors were not, they were employees of another firm who then contracted them to us. The advantage was they could be gone with a moment’s notice; as usual, a benefit for the psychopath firm, but a crap way to treat employees. Except for the ones with exceptional skill and managed their own contracting, they were grossly underpaid and had none of the benefits that employees of a big firm had. Worse, you had some people who were essential to the operation but higher management were prepared to dump on a moment’s notice when quarterly results went down.
The Dept of Justice has announced that they will end the use of private contractors to run federal prisons. They say they will not renew these contracts and may move to cancel.
This will take some time and will probably happen only as existing contracts expire. Stocks of these publicly traded companies are tanking, at least for awhile today. Not all of them are publicly traded, MTC mentioned in the Washington Post link below is a privately held corporation from Utah.