“You know we are not an Employment Agency”: Manpower, Government, and the Development of the Temporary Help Industry in Britain

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.

Bringing Gramsci back in: labor control in Italy's new temporary help industry

This article examines the labor control processes being implemented in Italy's recently developed temporary help industry. The social science literature generally predicts that voluntary forms of labor control require genuine compromises between management and its workforce. Based on interviews, observational field-work, and analysis of industry documents, the authors compare this expectation against the details of the Italian case. Overall, they find that management is attempting to build consensus not by granting temporary workers meaningful concessions, as the literature would generally suggest, but rather by reframing temporary work as a viable opportunity for upward social mobility, and reinforcing these ideological messages with coercion when needed.These findings suggest that ideological power may play a larger role in the labor control process than previously recognized, and that Gramsci's theory of ideological hegemony deserves greater attention from scholars studying such matters.