Economics Brief 2

Just like is the case with firms in other industries, the number of employees within an organization has legal consequences. The benefits, opportunities, as well as requirements as per the healthcare law are influenced by the size of the workforce. A majority of firms in this industry are large employers since by definition, they have at least 50 full-time employees. They have to file information pertaining to the kind of health insurance they offer to their full-time employees (Smilansky, 2017, 10-1).

It is imperative to appreciate that some of the employees do not meet what is referred to as the “50 employees and 75 miles’ requirement”. Supposing that a firm which is located in Connecticut has 5000 employees, but just 25 of them are in Connecticut. If there are no offices or company workplaces within 75 miles of the head office, then an employee is ineligible for a Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) leave. Another reason as to why a firm mind about the number of employees is to have only those who are needed to meet the business objectives (Chase, 2017, 48-9).

Workforces are expensive to maintain and management structures get complicated with the increase in numbers. In that case, a firm ought to only maintain an optimum number of workers. The Figure 1 below is a comparison of the number of employees engaged with organizations of various categories. The comparison is between the numbers recorded in 2016 and those anticipated in 2026 (Statista, 2018). It is apparent that in most categories, there will be relatively changes, considering that the economy will have expanded by then and the number of clients increased tremendously.

Figure 1: Employment in the Management of Companies and Enterprises Industry in U.S. 2016-2026 (Statista, 2018).

For the category of firms with between 20 and 99 employees, the number will actually drop from 49,707 to 45,121 workers. For the category with between 100 and 499 employees, there will be an increase from 214,584 to 224,649. For firms with between 500 and 999 employees, the number of workers rises from 142,902 to 151,643. With those within the category of 1000 to 2499 employees, the number of workers is expected to rise from 233,015 to 252,727 by 2026. There is an expected increase of workers from 231,582 to 245,761 for firms with 2500 and 4999 employees. For the firms in the category of 5000 to 9999 employees, the number of workers rises from 278,015 to 324,956. Nonetheless, there will be a drop for the firms with 10,000 employees; and the drop will be from 1,081,799 to 1,067,576 employees (Statista, 2018).

Conclusion

There is a difference between a worker and an employee, and it mostly have to do with the law. With employees, the firm has to cater for their Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, and compensation insurance. It means that the payroll reports, including W-2 forms are complex with an increase in the number of employees. The workers being referred to in this case are independent contractors for whom the firm does not have to incur these additional costs (Cohn & Hsu Kelley, 2017, 25-6). Besides, they are engaged based on the workload. The reason some categories will see a drop in the number of workers as others have minimal increases is that even with the rise in the number of clients, some of the work will be completed via the use of technology. Management of companies and enterprises is still a promising industry for those who wish to invest in it. As for the workers, there will be the need to be highly skilled to avoid redundancy (Chase, 2017, 45).