Manpower

Manpower 'helps companies anticipate and benefit from the changes happening in the world of work. They have 50 years of experience in staffing and recruitment, training, HR Services, outsourcing and consulting.'(ref?). It was formerly known as Blue Arrow. When Dennis Stevenson’s joined Manpower in 1988, he stated that after four months, he “asked all the British executives on the board to resign”

There are three aspects to the ‘Blue Arrow affair’: the row between the directors (which Stevenson initiated to a certain extent), the share scam of County NatWest and the secrecy surrounding the subsequent cover-up of the DTI. But for the stockmarket crash of 19 October, 1987, the illegality would have remained secret.

Manpower provide staffing services across all skillsets to all sectors including driving, public sector, production, warehouse, retail, technical, office and finance. They place thousands of temporary and permanent staff into small, local companies every week and design and deliver customised HR and outsourcing solutions to some of the largest companies in the world.

They operate in 72 different countries and territories and provide individual service to 2.5 million employees worldwide. In the UK there are over 300 offices, and more than half are on-site contracts, where they work for the client from their premises.

Over 1.2 million candidates screened every year, 30,000 employees are on assignment across all industries in the UK at any one time and over half of these were within FTSE 100 companies

Flexible working

The New Millennium Experience Company (NMEC) run by Peter Mandelson offered 2000 of the 5000 jobs available at the Dome to Manpower who had also sponsored the Dome’s ‘Work Zone,’ a surreal celebration of ‘flexible working’, which featured a huge clock, ticking away the estimated 100,000 hours we spend at work in a lifetime.

Manpower is the largest ‘employer’ in the US and is both an orchestrator and a beneficiary of the explosion in ‘contingent employment,’ and ‘flexible’ labour markets. According to its director Mitchell Fromstein:

"The U.S. is going from just-in-time manufacturing to just-in-time employment. The employer tells us, “I want them delivered exactly when I want them, as many as I need, and when I don’t need them, I don’t want them here” ... Can I get people to work under these circumstances? Yeah. We’re the ATMs of the job market."

Fromstein (who was the highest paid executive of a publicly held corporation with a yearly $4,078,805) presents himself, not so much as a mediator of this condition but as a guileless servant of the automation of the market:

"We are not exploiting people. We are not setting the fees. The market is. We are matching people with demands. What would our workers be doing without us? Unemployment lines? Welfare? Suicide?"

In conjunction with BT, to demonstrate ‘distance working,’ Manpower established its first ‘contact centre’ in Thurso, in 1993. Now renamed ‘call centres’ their promotion draws on PR terms such as ‘the porous economy’ or ‘the agile economy’ to gloss the reality of the return to a lack of employment rights.

With the Dome, Manpower’s intentions, other than proximity to government, were to influence the unions — sponsoring the TUC’s May Day ‘celebration’ in the Dome. But business sponsorship of the Dome was also strongly connected to lobbying the new government. McGuigan (2003) observed a range of possible outcomes in that Manpower went on to win lucrative contracts for the management of ‘employment zones;’ BAe Systems sponsorship of the ‘Mind Zone’, may have had an ulterior motive to influence government policy, especially ‘ethical’ foreign policy, which at one stage was threatening to restrict arms sales; the Hinduja brothers’ sponsorship of the ‘Faith Zone’ may have delivered a favour in return with Peter Mandelson’s attempts to facilitate their application for British passports; Tesco, who sponsored the ‘Learning Zone’, benefited by the government withdrawing a proposal to tax out-of-town car-parking; British Airways, who sponsored ‘Home Planet’, gained permission to build a new terminal at Heathrow; Camelot sponsored ‘Shared Ground’ and unexpectedly had its licence to run the National Lottery renewed; BSkyB sponsored ‘Skyscape’ and benefited from subsequent policy on broadcasting and digitalisation.

People

• Dennis Stevenson
• Thomas Boyd-Carpenter
• David Arkless, Senior Vice-President Corporate Affairs

Manpower’s board comprise a collective which thrive from a highly politicised and ‘Americanicized’ view of employment. Ignoring Stevenson’s other networks, taken together their directors other interests include: Molson Coors Brewing Company, McDonald’s, IBM, Heineken N.V., Hewlett-Packard, Electrolux, Visa Israel, Arthur Andersen & Co, Johnson Controls, Inc., AT&T Corporation, The Boeing Company, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company (3M). Its political connections are to the Brookings Institution, the George C. Marshall Foundation, Atlantic Council of the U.S, the U.S. Department of State Executive Compensation Committee, The Centre for European Policy Studies, The European Policy Centre the World Economic Forum and others.

Affiliations

Membership, funding, connections

• Aurora Women's Network
• CSR Europe
• European Policy Centre
• Policy Studies Institute, sponsor
• Working Links

PR and Lobbying firms

• Ergo Communications, 2004
• Salt, 2004