But outsourcing was never simply about cost cutting. It was also about the growing resistance to unionization and evading long-standing labor regulations. As companies expanded their reliance on a far-flung network of contingent staff, they shrank the number of on-site, full-time employees who were eligible to collectively bargain or to push for increasing workers' benefits. Following a largely untested management theory, a wave of corporations in the 1980s cut anything that could be defined as "non-essential business operations" - from cleaning offices to debugging software programs - in order to impress stockholders with their true value, defined in terms of "return on investment" [...] and "core competencies." [...]