A foot in the door for private companies who will no doubt want to expand into other areas of the employment service. It already has a New Deal contract in Wales, where it came a stunning eighth out of 11 in the area for getting people into work. It has also earned itself lots of brownie points from the government by sponsoring the work-zone in the Millennium Dome. Manpower also had the job of recruiting strike-breakers when British Airways was facing strikes in 1997. They are also the biggest employers of call centre staff in the UK - 25,000.
Labour is cheap, flexible and temporary - with no employment or union rights.
Manpower have an office in every BT call centre in the country, and re-cycle staff on a week by week basis. Every week there is a new batch of automated voice robots for BT s telephone networks. I ve seen Manpower staff thrown out of the building for arriving at work five minutes late, accidently cutting a customer off, or phoning in sick. Their boss is Alec Reed who likes to bung New Labour the odd 100,000, which is loose change when your family fortune is around 50 million. Reed did create one job, however, for Labour s Lord Tom Sawyer who joined the board of Reed Executive.