Enterprise and Society Advance Access published online on April 18, 2008
Enterprise and Society, doi:10.1093/es/khm105
"You know we are not an Employment Agency": Manpower, Government, and the Development of the Temporary Help Industry in Britain
CHRIS FORDE is the senior lecturer in Industrial Relations at the Centre for Employment Relations Innovation and Change, Leeds University Business School, United Kingdom. Contact information: Leeds University Business School, Maurice Keyworth Building, Leeds University, Leeds, LS2 9JT. UK.
E-mail: cjf{at}lubs.leeds.ac.uk
This article looks at the early development of the temporary help industry in Britain. It focuses on the activities of one of the largest suppliers of temporary workers, Manpower, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Drawing on material from The UK National Archives, the article examines Manpower's efforts to gain access as a genuine employer to the state employment exchange network to advertise their temporary vacancies. The article reveals the incremental changes in attitude within the government towards Manpower's activities and argues that this gave the company a competitive advantage over other employment agencies, facilitating their development of relations with the government and the trade unions in Britain over the 1970s and 1980s. The main conclusion of the article is that explicit attention needs to be paid to the actions and strategies of agencies themselves in order to develop an adequate understanding of the growth and development of the temporary help industry.
I would like to thank Andy Charlwood, George Gonos, Ed Heery, Matthias Kipping, Ian Kirkpatrick, Gary Slater, David Spencer, Mark Stuart, Steve Vincent, Richard Whiting, and participants at the 2003 British Universities Industrial Relations Association Conference (Leeds), the 2004 International Industrial Relations Association European Congress (Lisbon), and the 2005 research seminar series at the Industrial Relations Research Unit, Warwick Business School for helpful comments on the development of this article. I would also like to thank Professor Steven Tolliday and two anonymous readers at Enterprise & Society for their helpful comments. I would also like to acknowledge the staff at the National Archives, Kew, and at the Modern Records Centre, Warwick University for their assistance with the retrieval of archival data for this project. All remaining errors are my own.