CONTRACT WORKER

An employed or self-employed worker contracted for a particular task or temporary position, the duration of which is generally specified in the contract.

"A further challenge for unions in the twenty first century is to organise the increasingly large numbers of workers in the large and expanding informal sector who have no formal employer. […] In industrialised countries, an increasing number of people are self-employed or contract workers, often working for their former ‘employers,' but with a legal status that effectively excludes them from all or most of the protections of employment laws."
(International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), Congress Statement: Making Vision into Reality: Priorities for the ICFTU in the 21st Century, 2000, visited 2009-06-09)

"In the public sector, neo-liberalism has played a more direct role, where it has fuelled an obsession with deficit reduction that has translated into financial constraints on public sector managers, forcing them to resort to a variety of flexibility strategies, a case in point obviously being the increased use of contract employees."
(U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Contract Labor, Contracting Out: The Implications of New Forms of Work For Industrial Relations, 1998, visited 2009-06-09)

Hiring contract workers can help meet the work needs of an organization without increasing staff numbers and leading to employment expenses such as employment insurance, pension plans, vacation pay, or other employee benefits. In general, an organization should hire a contract worker as a contract employee when it needs regular full- or part-time work to be done over a significant period of time; and hire a contract worker as a self-employed service provider when the organization needs advice, specialized services or irregular short-term work.
(adapted from Human Resources Council for the Voluntary/Non-profit Sector, HR Policies & Employment Legislation Sample Policies on Common HR Topics, visited 2009-06-09)