The plan to eliminate or restrict contractor and intermediary firms was announced as a promise to end one of the most grinding mechanisms of labor exploitation, a structure that has for years kept large parts of the workforce suspended between real work and rightlessness. For millions of company-employed, contract, and project-based workers, “contracting” has never been a mere administrative label.

It has meant lower pay for identical work, permanent insecurity, brittle contracts, wage discrimination, and the gradual erasure of any job stability. For this reason, the announced removal of intermediaries could at first appear as an acknowledgment of structural injustice and an effort to redress it. What has emerged so far, however, looks less like the end of a mechanism than its entry into a phase of political, administrative, and economic struggle.

At the level of announcement, the plan’s purpose seems clear: remove the labor-supply intermediaries, shorten the distance between the principal employer and the worker, and dismantle the mechanism that absorbs a significant share of the value of labor along the way.

At a more concrete level, the plan can also be read as an attempt to contain widespread discontent among company-employed workers, a response to social pressure, and a recalibration of the state’s relationship to one of the most bloated zones of wage inequality. In other words, the plan can carry reformist potential and at the same time function as crisis management. That doubleness complicates any assessment of it.

The reason such a plan stalls or is implemented only partially must be sought in the nature of the contracting structure itself. In many sectors, contracting is not simply a method of employment; it is a network of interests. Over years, the intermediary firms, the layered contracts, the labor-supply structures, and the administrative and political circuits around them have become part of an economy of rent distribution, influence, and resource control. In this setting, actually removing a contractor does not only mean changing the worker’s contract. It means displacing or eliminating the established interests of those who have profited from the structure.

This is where the resistance begins: administrative delays, the complication of regulations, the rebranding of job titles, the staged and limited rollout.

Among the most serious obstacles is the power of the lobbies and intermediary networks with a stake in the status quo, groups for whom preserving the structure is not a question of human-resource management but the defense of an economic position and organizational power.

Under such conditions, the more the plan stays general, ambiguous, and free of clear operational benchmarks, the greater the chance that the same mechanism will be reproduced under a new name. The surface removal of the contractor, without the real removal of intermediation, can produce only an administrative rearrangement of the same old relations.

If the plan is carried out in earnest, its most meaningful effects would be a narrowing of part of the wage gap, greater clarity in the employment relationship, the curtailing of some intermediary rent, and a relative strengthening of job security. But if implementation is partial, selective, deceptive, or merely cosmetic, the result can be more dangerous still: rising expectations without real change, the reproduction of the same inequality under new packaging, and a further erosion of workers’ trust.

Partial implementation, especially when paired with loud publicity, can become only a tool for releasing social pressure without altering anything fundamental.

The core question is that the fate of such a plan is decided not at the level of promises but in the details of execution: Will direct contracts become a real replacement? Will wage discrimination decrease? Will job security rise? Will intermediary structures actually be eliminated, or will they simply change names?

Without clear answers to these questions, any claim of reform can lead back to the same prior condition.

In all of this, the role of workers is decisive. Experience has shown that no intermediary, rent-based structure is dismantled by a directive from above alone, unless the workforce moves from individual expectation to organized, forceful, and sustained collective demand.

As we have already argued, the task of workers is not merely to welcome the removal of the contractor; demanding transparency, monitoring implementation, insisting on real direct contracts, wage equality, and preventing the reproduction of intermediaries under new forms. this is the central part of the process. If the demand is reduced to “removing the contractor as a title,” the chances that the reform will be captured or diverted run high. If the demand focuses on “removing the exploitative relations of contracting,” the chances of genuine change rise with it.

In the end, the plan to eliminate contracting firms stands at a fork between two roads. Either it becomes an instrument for partial reform of one of the most discriminatory mechanisms of employment, or, lost in the maneuvering of interests, lobbies, and cosmetic implementation, it becomes one more grinding broken promise.

What decides the dominant path is not the text of decisions made above, but the balance of power between the workforce, the entrenched interests, and the level of social pressure for real implementation. What is at stake is the confrontation with a mechanism that, for years, has turned instability and discrimination into the normal model of employment. Removing one intermediary does not touch it.