Geoforum 36 (2005) 223–240

www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum

Making Manchester ‘flexible’: competition and change inthe temporary staffing industry

Kevin Ward

School of Environment and Development and the European Work and Employment Research Centre (EWERC), University of Manchester,

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK

Received 11 April 2003; received in revised form 17 May 2004

Abstract

According to local economic and political commentators, Manchester’s economy is booming. Employment is growing, invest-

ment is on the up, people are moving back into the city centre, and in 2002 the city hosted the largest multi-sporting event to be held

in England since the 1948 Olympics. Local economic and political actors point to the wave of economic optimism that has

accompanied the ‘entrepreneurial turn’ performed in the late 1980s by the city’s political institutions. As part of this, emphasis

switched away from Manchester’s industrial past and to its possible post-industrial futures. The city council stopped talking

defensively––about ‘defending jobs’––and begun to talk about ‘making things happen’. New-style political strategies focused on

raising the profile of the city, through sustained marketing strategies aimed at selling Manchester as a flexible, twenty-first century

consumer-orientated city, despite the loss of 90,000 jobs between 1991 and 1997 and the profound restructuring of the city’s eco-

nomic base. As part of this contradictory process of politically talking up the economy while it has struggled to perform, this paper

argues that the conditions have been created in which Manchester’s temporary staffing industry has been able to thrive. The first

English city to regulate the earliest incarnation of temporary staffing agencies, employment bureaux, and hence with a long

established ‘industry’ as such, this paper exams the newly re-energised Manchester temporary staffing industry, and sets out some of

the ways in which it is restructuring.

� 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Temporary staffing industry; Labour markets; Flexibility; Manchester

00

do

Temporary help firms are playing a growing role in

shaping the operation of the labour market. They

are becoming an important labour market institu-

tion. For example, they recruit and screen regularemployees for firms (hence performing a ‘‘labor ex-

change’’ function), they staff the human resources

departments of some firms (they are an outsourcer),

and they have linked up with outplacement firms to

help find jobs for laid off workers (a function in

principle performed by the public employment

and training system). Where all this will go is un-

clear (Osterman, 1999, p. 9, quoted in Peck andTheodore, 2001, p. 475).

E-mail address: k.g.ward@man.ac.uk (K. Ward).

16-7185/$ - see front matter � 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

i:10.1016/j.geoforum.2004.05.005

Temporary staffing agencies have found a niche in

providing organizations with temporary personnel,

turning the idea of numerical flexibility into a busi-

ness idea (Garsten, 1999, p. 602).

1. Introduction

According to a recent report by the UK government’s

Department of Trade and Industry, ‘the employmentagency industry is a new and very dynamic sector in the

British economy’ (Hotopp, 2001, p. 8). At the end of

2002 the UK temporary staffing industry was worth £23

billion, and its revenues had more than doubled in the

proceeding five years. It is now the largest temporary

staffing industry in Europe, the second largest in the

world, behind the home of temporary staffing, the US,

224 K. Ward / Geoforum 36 (2005) 223–240

and now consists of over eleven thousand agencies, an

increase of over 50% from 1996. Numerically, then, it

matters.

And if this quantitative expansion does make itworthy of further examination, the last decade has also

seen the industry undergo a qualitative restructuring. Its

business is no longer restricted to the clerical and light-

industrial segments, its traditionally strong markets

(Ward, 2003). In the last decade temporary staffing

agencies have begun to expand out of their traditional

markets––with varying degrees of success––as part of a

wider attempt by the global industry to re-brand itsproduct (Peck and Theodore, 2002; Ward, 2001,

2004a,b). 1 So, placements in sectors such as healthcare,

local government, and IT and in managerial occupations

have increased, as temporary staffing agencies have

looked to go ‘up market’, while placements in the

industry’s more traditional occupations have also con-

tinued to grow (Recruitment and Employment Con-

federation, 2003). For those seeking employment in theUK the growing presence of temporary staffing agencies

has a series of implications in terms of the conditions

under which they labour and the form of their attach-

ment to the labour market. 2 These issues have been

well-documented elsewhere, often outside of geography,

and will not be discussed here (but see Garsten, 1999;

Gottfried, 1991, 1992; Gray, 2002; Henson, 1996; Par-

ker, 1994; Rogers, 2000). Suffice to say that in terms ofthe ways in which agencies have re-shaped the UK la-

bour market, by the mid 1990s temporary jobs were

accounting for one-third of new hires in the labour

market (Philipott, 1999), with over one in five of the

unemployed using temporary staffing agencies in an at-

tempt to re-enter the labour market (Michielsens et al.,

2000), making an understanding of the temporary

staffing industry important for those campaigning onbehalf of worker rights (Trade Union Congress, 2001)

and those with a stake in labour market performances

more generally, such as government departments, com-

munity organisations, local governments, and business

associations.

Of course, the temporary staffing industry, as it is

known in the US, is not new: it has existed in the UK for

a number of years. There is evidence that temporary

1 The largest temporary staffing agencies have been claiming to ‘go

global’ since the early 1990s (Overman, 1993). While some undoubt-

edly have internationalised their operations (Ward, 2004a,b), the bulk

of the temping business continues to be done in a small number of

countries.2 For those from outside the UK seeking employment in it

temporary staffing agencies are one means of gaining entry into the

labour market. An example of this is the ways in which the largest

agencies have jostled for market share in the accession countries over

the last eighteen months, as they have begun to put in place the

institutional architecture necessary to place workers in the UK from

countries such as the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia.

staffing agencies were performing their business in the

UK as long ago as the 1950s and 1960s (Moore, 1965).

Almost thirty years ago Moore (1975, p. 767)) was

moved to claim that:

The practice of ‘‘renting’’ labor has become very

widespread as employers seek ways to retain flexi-

bility in a dynamic economy and avoid the inconve-

nience and expense inherent in the conventional

employment relationship.

And yet their presence in British cities seems now

somehow more visible and more pronounced, as if what

they do is now more acceptable, their activities at the

very centre of the contemporary employment relation-

ship. Anyone who has walked around the centre of an

English city over the last decade or so cannot fail tohave noticed how on some streets almost every other

shop is a temporary staffing agency. Each city has its

own ‘temp row’: in Birmingham it’s New Street, and the

postcode B1 more widely, while in Manchester its Cross

Street, and the area of M1 postcodes more generally.

Sitting squarely in the centre of English cities, temporary

staffing agencies are important symbols of the ‘new’,

more flexible economies of these cities. They are clearmarkers to those who walk around a city that it matters,

that it is connected into wider global economic networks

that stretch to the US, to mainland Europe and to the

Far East. As the large multinationals, the Manpowers of

this world, rub shoulders with the smaller, local inde-

pendents, so an image is conjured up of a city that can

deliver ‘on the ground labour market flexibility’, and so

is in a position to compete with other cities.Nowhere in the UK does a city’s temporary staffing

industry have more of a real and symbolic impact than

in Manchester. In 1903 the Manchester Corporation

became the first English city to regulate its employment

bureaux. As the first industrial city, where work and

identity went hand-in-hand (for white male manufac-

turing workers at least), Manchester’s economic suc-

cesses were built on a strong work ethic. Casual workersand those inside the formal labour market performed

alongside one another, for example, in loading the car-

gos onto the barges that sailed off down the Manchester

Ship Canal. In the proceeding one hundred years the

bureau of then has become the temporary staffing

agency of today: mediating work and placing workers.

In 1965 there were twenty agencies listed in the city

(Kelly’s Directory, 1965), almost all of which specialisedin the placement of office and secretarial staff in jobs

such as ‘shorthand typist’, ‘comptometer’, ‘accounting

machine operators’ and ‘clerks’. Almost forty years later

and the number of agencies in Manchester had risen

tenfold and included in its ranks some of the largest

global multinationals. And unlike the mid-1960s,

workers are not just being placed in offices and in fac-

K. Ward / Geoforum 36 (2005) 223–240 225

tories: today placements occur in a long and a still

growing list of industrial sectors.

Outside of London, I want to argue that Manchester

is the most ‘temped out’ city in the UK. It has moretemporary staffing agencies per head of working popu-

lation that any English ‘second city’. These labour

market intermediaries (who through their very existence

actively shape the demand for their services) have seen

their business expand in the city. Manchester’s self-

proclaimed ‘urban renaissance’ (Peck and Ward, 2002)

has drawn upon and contributed to wider trends in la-

bour market deregulation, new corporate hiring prac-tices, and new forms of economic activity. In light of

this, albeit self-positioned place as entrepreneurial city

par excellence, and the size of the city’s temporary

staffing industry, Manchester provides an interesting site

on which to explore the ways in which some of the more

systemic changes in the UK temporary staffing industry

play out in locally-specific ways. Moreover, the research

findings presented here should be of note to those whoare interested in the industry’s business model in its

more mature markets (Peck and Theodore, 2002; Ward,

2003).

In light of these concerns this paper does three things.

First, it outlines the key characteristics of the city’s

temporary staffing industry that has been both growing

and diversifying over the last three decades. Second, the

paper draws upon forty semi-structured interviews withagency owners and managers, industry trade bodies,

government representatives, labour unions and so on, to

examine in some detail the nature of the business

agencies perform. 3 It focuses on the very modus ope-

randi of the Manchester industry before moving on to

examine some of the ways in which the industry is

changing. Third, the paper concludes by arguing that

the rapid growth in temporary staffing agencies acrossEnglish cities and the changes in the business they per-

form has had profound implications for both the dis-

mantling of the standard employment relationship that

emerged in cities like Manchester under Fordism, and

the uneven and partial emergence of its replacement.

3 Semi-structured interviews were arranged with the owners/man-

agers of agencies in a wide-range of sectors, from healthcare to call

centres, from legal to transport. All interviews were organised around

a range of themes, lasted approximately an hour and were fully

transcribed. The rationale for using this method to generate informa-

tion was twofold: (i) first, that the research was trying to get at the

dynamic process of temping: issues of competition, worker placement,

changing relationships with client firms/workers etc. and that semi-

structured interviews are an appropriate means of achieving this and

(ii) second, existing quantitative data measures the size and structure of

the national industry but are unable to explain much of what it reports

(see Hotopp, 2001). The small number of studies of temporary staffing

use similar methods, reflecting that it’s a ‘complex, fast-changing and

to some extent subterranean industry’ (Peck and Theodore, 2001, p.

474).

2. Restructuring economies, restructuring temporary

staffing industries

The business of temporary employment has boomedin the last few years, as part of the wider expansion

of what Abraham (1990) terms ‘market-mediated

arrangements’, which has seen temporary staffing in the

UK takes its place alongside head-hunters, permanent

recruitment services and day labourers as one of a suite

of ‘labour processing’ industries (Peck and Theodore,

2001). On the one hand the temporary staffing industry’s

very raison d’etre is the de-coupling of the firm fromworker (Ricca, 1982). As Gonos (1997, p. 86) argues

about the logic underpinning the growth in temporary

staffing:

In allowing core firms throughout the economy to

rid themselves of legal obligations with respect to

a proportion of the workforce, the temporary [staff-

ing] formula [has become] a key mechanism for thedramatic restructuring of employment relations in

the 1970s.

And in performing their own business in placing la-

bour and mediating work agencies re-shape wider

employment relations: their labour market influence is

not restricted to the workers they place. As Peck andTheodore (2002, p. 156) argue, drawing upon their

empirical work in the US:

[T]he significance of the temp industry . . . relates tothat much wider field of employment relations

where temping is a viable option and where it there-

fore exerts an influence over the strategic choicesand constraints of employers and workers.

On the other hand, recently temporary staffing

agencies have moved to expand their role beyond simply

delivering quantitative flexibility. Evidence suggests that

some of the larger firms in the industry have entered into

the business of the ‘rebundling of skills and the reor-ganization of employment functions’ (Peck and Theo-

dore, 2001, p. 478) in an effort to deliver qualitative

flexibility. And yet before we move on to explore the

‘wider field’ that Peck and Theodore (2002) talk about it

is important that we understand the quantitative and

qualitative co-ordinates of the growth in UK temporary

staffing.

In the financial year 1996–97 the turnover of the UKtemporary staffing industry was £9.9 million: for the

financial year 2001–02 it was £22.6 million (Recruitment

and Employment Confederation, 2002). This increase of

129% in five years is mirrored by the growth in the

number of temporary staffing agencies that make up the

UK temporary staffing industry. Between 1992 and 2002

the number of what the Recruitment and Employment

Table 1

Changing occupational mix of temporary staffing business: 1985/86–

2001/02a

Occupational groups Percentage of

FRES temporary

placements

(1985–86)

Percentage of

REC placements

(2001–02)

Secretarial and office 61 14.3

Hotel and catering 7 2.9

Technical and engineering 7 7.4

Unskilled and semi-skilled 16 No category

Blue collar No category 20.4

Professional and

management

1 1.2

Nursing and medical 3 21.7

Computing 5 8

Drivers 0 8.9

Education 0 3.6

Financial 0 2.2

Other 0 9.4

Total 100 100

Source: FREC (1986) and REC (2003).a There is a dearth of robust data on the UK temporary staffing

industry (Hotopp, 2000; Ward, 2003): this is acknowledged by the

Recruitment and Employment Confederation, the UK industry’s trade

body, and in light of this, data should be read as illustrative rather than

exact.

226 K. Ward / Geoforum 36 (2005) 223–240

Confederation (REC) refer to as ‘recruitment consul-

tancies’ increased from 8,342 to 11, 173, a 34% increase

(Recruitment and Employment Confederation, 2002).

Not surprisingly, accompanying the growth inindustry revenues and in the number of agencies has

been an increase in the number of workers they place.

Although there is no agreement on how many workers

are placed each week, evidence suggests it is somewhere

between six hundred thousand and a million (Hotopp,

2001; Recruitment and Employment Confederation,

2002). The proportion of the workforce working

through a temporary staffing agency at any one timeremains small in the UK––around 3% or 4% (Depart-

ment of Trade and Industry, 1999; Recruitment and

Employment Confederation, 2001). However, in terms

of the non-standard workforce that includes part-time,

fixed-term, and casual workers etc., temporary staffing is

a rapidly growing way of gaining employment. More-

over, US evidence has revealed how official labour

market measures are unable to cope with the fast-mov-ing realities of the temp business (Cappelli et al., 1998;

Houseman, 1998), a point seemingly also of concern in

the UK (Hotopp, 2001). So, and despite the ‘defiance of

accurate quantitative description’ (Peck and Theodore,

2001, p. 474) the data that are available points to an

industry that is rapidly expanding––both geographically

and industrially.

In addition agencies have widened the number ofindustrial sectors in which they do their business. Tra-

ditionally the temporary staffing industry has thrived on

day-to-day placements in the offices and the warehouses

that serviced the Fordist economies of urban Britain.

Table 1 reveals the changing face of UK temporary

employment and of the industry in its own right. In

1985–86––the first year that the then trade body the

Federation of Recruitment and Employment Services(FRES) collected data—almost two-thirds of all tem-

porary placements were in ‘secretarial and office’. Six-

teen per cent of placements were in ‘unskilled and semi-

skilled’, while ‘nursing and medical’ and ‘professional

and management’ hardly register (Federation of

Recruitment and Employment Services, 1986). Some

sixteen years later and the picture is rather different: the

proportion of temporary workers placed in ‘secretarialand office’ has plummeted, while ‘blue collar’ place-

ments have faired rather better. ‘Nursing and medical’,

‘drivers’, ‘education’ and ‘financial’ have all expanded to

constitute together over 35% of the overall market

(Recruitment and Employment Confederation, 2003).

The stubbornly low penetration rate in ‘professional/

managerial’ reveals that despite what they might claim,

agencies are finding it hard to increase the amount ofbusiness they do at the top of the occupational hierar-

chy.

Temporary staffing agencies are also beginning to

enter into partnerships and contracts with central and

local government to supply teachers and nurses and to

deliver various New Deal programmes (Michielsens

et al., 2000). They have been encouraged by the Labour

government to enter into public–private partnershipswith the Employment Service, with the likes of Adecco

and Reed Personnel charged with placing workers

through the New Deal in Liverpool and London,

reflecting how the previously stigmatised industry has

begun gradually to gain wider acceptance. This

involvement in the delivery of urban welfare pro-

grammes speaks to the very real ways in which tempo-

rary staffing agencies in both the US and the UK havebeen active in the remaking of the social norms, political

practices and state forms that oversee the regulation of

some parts of local labour markets. Global businesses

(the agencies) are involved in (national) state restruc-

turing to deliver (local) programmes. Evidence of the

territoriality of labour regulation, the example of tem-

porary staffing supports Peck’s (1996, p. 106) contention

that as geographers we need:

To investigate the ways in which processes and

institutions of labor regulation are locally based.

This is not to say that all regulatory institutions

are locally based. Rather, it highlights the need to

investigate the ways in which processes and institu-

tions of labor regulation are locally articulated.

This is not to say that control of labor regulationresides at the local scale. While there is undeniably

some scope for local agency, it occurs within a set

Table 2

Growth in urban England of temporary staffing agencies, 1971–2001

1971 1981 1991 2001 % Change,

1971–2001

Birmingham 60 69 138 293 388

Bristol 26 49 108 212 715

Leeds 35 49 111 225 542

Liverpool 29 32 42 54 86

Manchester 65 89 168 252 287

Newcastle 18 31 78 75 316

Total 233 319 645 1111 385

Source: British Telecom Yellow Pages across all cities, 1971, 1981, 1991,

2001.

K. Ward / Geoforum 36 (2005) 223–240 227

of structural parameters relating, for example, to

nation-state policies and the imperatives of global

accumulation.

It is something of a truism that labour markets are

made locally (Coe, 2000; Martin, 2000; Peck, 1989) and

that they ‘are socially regulated in geographically dis-

tinctive ways’ (Peck, 1996, p. 106). And yet, there has

been little work that has sought to understand the waysin which the growth in temporary staffing plays out in

different ways in different places, as a precursor to an

examination of the ways in which temporary staffing

influences local labour markets, and, in turn, local la-

bour markets shape the form of temporary staffing

(Ward, 2004a). That work on Local Labour Control

Regimes (LLCR) (Jonas, 1996; Kelly, 2001) has con-

ceptualised the ways in which differently scaled eco-nomic and political activities combine and interact to

produce a ‘local’ regulatory structure. In the work of

Kelly in Singapore, temporary staffing agencies were one

of the institutions that made up the LLCR. However,

and as insightful and innovative as this work is, it has

taken a rather one-sided and partial view of temporary

staffing, not connecting local business practices to wider

trans-local corporate networks. Put succinctly, how aresegments of the local labour market made through

trans-local relations?

And were this not enough, there is also a need to

consider the inter-connections between the types of

urban development pursued in places such as Man-

chester, and the role of the state more widely, as both an

employer and a political actor, and the growth over the

same period of the temporary staffing industry. Welfarestate restructuring, in the form of the fragmentation of

the public sector and the associated growth in new ser-

vice markets, the formation of Private Finance Initia-

tives (PFI) and Public Private Partnerships (PPP),

together with the internal adoption of new Public

Management techniques has created new markets for

temporary staffing agencies (Conley, 2002). Cumula-

tively these changes have undermined many of estab-lished pillars of the internal labour market, with the

effect that for many ‘public’ sector workers the terms

and conditions of their employment are no longer what

they once were. For some groups in cities this has rup-

tured well-established norms: in particular young

working class women and men, for whom the local state

was a relatively good employer, have had some ports of

entry into the labour market closed off, as temporarystaffing agencies have increased their share of business in

education, healthcare and local government (Beynon

et al., 2002). A second way in which we might interpret

the state having created the conditions under which

agencies are likely to prosper is through the pursuing of

a neo-liberal model of economic development, premised

on attracting low-end and high-end service jobs and

actively promoting places in terms of their ‘flexible’ la-

bour markets. Urban political change, in the form of

creating and fostering a ‘good business climate’, might

reasonably be understood as having both direct andindirect consequences for local labour markets.

The importance of urban labour markets in the

expansion of the UK temporary staffing industry is

confirmed by analysts, who point to the role of cities as

important sites for this growth. For example, in one of

their industry reports Key Note (2001, p. 12) argue that

‘much of [the growth] is focused around the large towns

and cities.’ In light of this, Table 2 sets out how thenumber of temporary staffing agencies has been growing

in England’s urban labour markets since the early 1970s.

Although figures differ from one city to the other, the

general trend is upwards: temporary staffing agencies

have been increasing the amount of business they do in

England’s largest labour markets (Ward, 2004a). The

growth is particularly pronounced since 1981, during

which time English cities underwent widespread eco-nomic and political restructuring, and were often the

sites for neo-liberal state responses to the ‘urban crisis’

of the 1970s and 1980s (such as the introduction of New

Deals for the unemployed since 1997). This urbanisation

of temporary staffing mirrors the expansionary trajec-

tory in the US. As Peck and Theodore (2002, p. 170)

argue ‘high urban labor-market penetration rates have

indeed been a feature of this more recent phase of the[US] TSI’s development.’

In each of the six English urban labour markets de-

tailed in this paper the growth in the number of tem-

porary staffing agencies between 1971 and 2001 is

impressive. Even thirty years ago each city had a tem-

porary staffing industry of note, reflecting both the early

presence of the large multi-nationals (Ward, 2004b), and

the number of local independents in each city that set upin competition. Since then growth rates range from 86%

in Liverpool to 715% in Bristol, with all but Liverpool

experiencing growth over the thirty years of over 280%.

Table 3 explores the number of temporary staffing

agencies per head of working population in each of the

six cities over the thirty-year period. In the absence of

Table

3

Tem

ped

outEnglish

cities

a

Number

of

temporary

staffing

agencies

(1971)

Working

population

Working

population

per

tempo-

rary

staffing

agency

Number

of

temporary

staffing

agencies

(1981)

Working

population

Working

population

per

tempo-

rary

staffing

agency

Number

of

temporary

staffing

agencies

(1991)

Working

population

Working

population

per

tempo-

rary

staffing

agency

Number

of

temporary

staffing

agencies

(2001)

Working

population

Working

population

per

tempo-

rary

staffing

agency

Birmingham

60

646,860

10,778

69

621,864

9013

138

592,719

4295

293

606,182

2069

Bristol

26

271,380

10,438

49

242,877

4957

108

238,996

2213

212

251,138

1185

Leeds

35

312,355

8924

49

436,260

8903

111

434,044

3910

225

462,753

2057

Liverpool

29

381,230

13,146

32

316,380

9887

42

282,673

6730

54

283,810

5256

Manchester

65

341,145

5248

89

273,198

3070

168

248,891

1481

252

258,025

1024

New

castle

18

140,435

7802

31

172,902

5577

78

163,624

2098

75

169,469

2260

Source:

British

Telecom

YellowPages

across

allcities,1971,1981,1991,2001;LabourForceSurvey,1971,1981,1991,2001.

aFor1981,1991and2001the‘workingpopulation’wastaken

as16–64;for1971data

limitationsmeantithadto

becalculatedas15–64.Foreach

ofthesixcities

theLFSdata

representsthelocal

authority

area.

228 K. Ward / Geoforum 36 (2005) 223–240

reliable urban data on the number of people placed

through temporary staffing agencies, this indicator acts

to suggest which of the six cities is the most ‘temped out’

and how this has changed over time. 4 This table revealsthree things. First, that over the period the working

population in each of the six cities has fluctuated, due

largely to economic restructuring and the reorganisation

of political boundaries. Second, that consistently in each

city the number of agencies has increased in relation to

the working population. Third, and finally, in 2001

Manchester was the most ‘temped out’ of the six cities,

with 1024 workers per temporary staffing agency. At theother end of the spectrum, in Liverpool there are 5256

workers per temporary staffing agency. This measure

speaks to how the processes shaping the regulation of

labour are articulated unevenly from one place to an-

other (Peck, 1996). The relatively early presence of

agencies in Manchester, the amount of turmoil in the

city’s economic fortunes in recent years, the growth in

employment in non-manufacturing sectors and the tra-ditionally high proportion of local employment in the

state sectors perhaps goes some way to explain the dif-

ferences between Manchester’s and the five other cities’

temporary staffing industries.

To re-cap, the argument presented here then is that

temporary staffing agencies constitute part of the locally

variable ‘socio-regulatory architecture that performs a

vital function in the reproduction of labour markets’(Peck, 1996, p. 106). More than simply placing workers

in a widening range of occupations, in performing their

business it is plausible to argue that agencies actively re-

work wider labour market norms, understandings and

expectations: the broad ‘field’ of employment relations.

Certainly research into the ways in which workers find

employment and the conditions under which they ‘temp’

supports this contention (Gottfried, 1991, 1992). As theamount of business they do has increased so it has be-

cause more conceptually and empirically important to

understand both the internal dynamics of the temporary

staffing industry and its wider regulatory effects. It is to

the former of these––to analyse and characterise the

growth of Manchester’s temporary staffing industry––

that this paper now turns its attention.

4 A methodological note: another way of interpreting the data is

that Manchester consists of smaller agencies than the five other cities,

explaining the variance in ‘working population per temporary staffing

agency’. Were this to be the case then Manchester might actually have

fewer temporary workers than the other cities. Although the response

rate to a survey of agencies across the six cities was not high enough to

report in this paper, the results do not suggest that Manchester’s mix

of small, medium, and large temporary staffing agencies is any different

to that of the other five cities. The survey findings, coupled with those

generated through the analysis of British Telecom Yellow Pages, reveal

Manchester’s local industrial structure to be similar to that in

Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool and Newcastle.

K. Ward / Geoforum 36 (2005) 223–240 229

3. Competition and change in Manchester’s temporary

staffing industry

In recent years the performance of its city council,chamber of commerce and the range of city and regional

institutions involved in its economic development has

led some to point to Manchester as entrepreneurial

urbanism personified (Peck and Ward, 2002; Quilley,

1998, 1999; Tickell and Peck, 1996). Embodying the very

essence of inter-urban competition, Manchester’s eco-

nomic and political elite has made a name for itself (and

the city). It has embraced the ‘opportunities’ presentedto it through the redrawing of state-market boundaries

and the changes made to urban economic and social

policy.

Working in partnership with representatives of the

local business sector, Manchester City Council (MCC)

successfully repositioned itself at the end of the 1980s:

from talking about state socialism it turned to practicing

entrepreneurial urbanism, bidding for and winning asuccession of national and EU grants to redevelop areas

around the outskirts and in the centre of the city.

Throughout the 1990s Manchester’s political and eco-

nomic leaders worked with each other to turn the city

around. From failing, industrial city with a tatty, run-

down built environment, Manchester successfully reno-

vated large numbers of its buildings. Old canal-sides

were turned into bars and into caf�es and empty ware-houses into flats as gentrification took hold.

To some this ‘transformation’ marked a rising of the

‘phoenix from the ashes’, an example of a city made-

good, now able to embrace its post-industrial future

with a renewed confidence. As Glancey (2001, p. 7) has

argued when writing in The Guardian:

Manchester, especially now it has its successful

tram network, upbeat Chinatown and buzzy night-

life, does have the air, on a good day, of a confident

European city.

A series of profound changes in the constitution andthe governance of the local economy have accompanied

this remaking of the urban aesthetic (Peck and Emme-

rich, 1992; Giordano and Twomey, 2002). New institu-

tions, such as the Manchester Training and Enterprise

Council (TEC) and then its replacement, Manchester

Enterprises, have worked alongside the more established

Manchester Chamber of Commerce, and the North

West Business Leadership Team. The aim was in parteconomic. The city haemorrhaged 90,000 jobs between

1971 and 1997 (Giordano and Twomey, 2002), as

unemployment figures across the city rose to above the

national average. Older, established manufacturing

industries went into free-fall, as the number of jobs

contracted by 39,000, or 62%, during the 1980s and

1990s. Sectors acutely affected included textiles and

clothing, engineering and allied trades and distributive

trades (Peck and Emmerich, 1992). From being the

driving force of the local and the regional economy,

Manchester manufacturing declined to such an extentthat by the end of 2002 only just over 14% of employ-

ment was in the sector, and this was in the context of a

working population that had itself dropped by 16%

between 1971 and 2002, from 344,739 to 289,878

(Manchester City Pride Partnership, 2003).

In Manchester service sector employment now in-

volves 77.1% of the local workforce. While the number

of jobs in sectors such as ‘banking, finance and insur-ance’ and ‘public administration, education and health’

has grown, these industries have made only a modest

contribution to replacing numerically the jobs that were

lost during the on-set of the crisis of Fordism, while

more qualitatively the jobs that have been created are

often not full-time and increasingly are not filled by

those previously employed in manufacturing. During

the 1980s and 1990s women’s participation rates haverisen in the city, so that in the late 1990s the gender

balance of the workforce tipped-over, with more women

that men now in the labour market. At the same time

part-time jobs also increased, with almost one-in-three

jobs in 1997 classified as consisting of ‘part time hours’

(Giordano and Twomey, 2002). What Manchester has

witnessed over the last three decades has been a change

in its industrial base and in the make-up of its work-force. With a long term unemployment (12 months and

plus) rate of 20% and a third of all those unemployed

aged between 16 and 24 (Manchester City Pride Part-

nership, 2003), Manchester’s economic institutions have

not yet been able to oversee the generation of the type or

number of jobs for those who have been outside of the

labour market for over a year, or for a core group of its

younger, mostly male, citizens. It is in this sort of con-text of on-going and deep-rooted labour market

restructuring that temporary staffing agencies appear to

have thrived (Peck and Theodore, 1998, 2001), with

others arguing that they do not help those most disad-

vantaged in the contemporary labour market (Gray,

2002).

The aim of remaking Manchester’s economic gover-

nance was also though political. These institutions (andothers) attempted to influence the ways in which the

local labour market worked. In some cases they were

nationally created institutions, with a clear neo-liberal

steer to delivering flexible local labour markets in the

context of economic restructuring (Peck and Jones,

1995): to make workers more ‘employable’, to introduce

active rather than passive labour market policies and to

re-instil into those not in formal employment an ethic ofwork. Other agencies emerged out of local concerns to

involve business in economic planning. However their

briefs often overlapped: to support the re-making of the

norms and practices associated with how firms recruited

230 K. Ward / Geoforum 36 (2005) 223–240

staff and the ways in which workers expected to gain

employment. In sum, these institutions sought locally to

usher in a new type of flexible employment relationship

(Benner, 2002; Peck and Theodore, 1998, 2001; Vosko,2000), of which temporary staffing agencies were a part,

in the process replacing much of the traditional post-

Second World War type that had dominated the UK’s

older industrial economies, such as Manchester (Briggs,

1963).

All part and parcel of the successful transition to a

post-industrial city, so those charged with performing

economic development in the city would say. In thecontext of economic globalisation, which has tended to

be taken at face value, as an extra-local reason for

pursuing a particular form of economic development,

Manchester’s economic agencies have set about re-

naming and re-making the city as a flexible economic

space, in part denying the economic realities that many

of those inside and outside the local labour market face

on a daily basis (Greater Manchester Low Pay Unit,2002). While they have not named temporary staffing as

part of this image-building exercise, 5 in pursuing this

form of economic development those overseeing the

city’s economic governance have worked with the wider

de-regulatory grain and created the conditions favour-

able for the growth and diversification of temporary

staffing agencies. As Peck and Theodore (2001, p. 475)

argue ‘it is clear that temp agencies make possible formsof employment externalisation and flexible labor utili-

zation which would not otherwise have been feasible’.

While the relationship between the activities of those

overseeing the city’s economy and Manchester’s tem-

porary staffing industry is a complex and clearly not a

functional one, there is a sense that the recent evolution

of the temporary staffing industry has been aided by the

particular political response of the city’s developmentagencies to Manchester’s on-going economic problems.

In turn, it might also be argued that the growth of

agencies in the city and the diversification in the services

they offer and sectors they offer them to has facilitated

Manchester’s move towards a more flexible economy.

5 This is surprising. The industry is clearly a visible one, discussions

with workers in a number of industrial sectors reveals that significant

number have been through an agency at one time or another in their

work histories (Beynon et al., 2002) and it consists of some of the

world’s largest multinationals and biggest employers. And yet its

continuing battle to gain mainstream approval and the subterranean

elements within its ranks means that those in charge of Manchester’s

economic and labour market governance seem strangely ignorant of

the industry’s size and its characteristics. However, this is not say that

the decision to pursue particular forms of investment, to talk about the

economy in particular ways, to oversee the restructuring of the local

public sector workforce has not played a role in creating the local

conditions in which temporary staffing agencies might prosper.

Conceptually it is possible to argue––as Harvey (1989) has––of a link

between entrepreneurial urbanism and labour market restructuring.

To illustrate this point, for example, Greater Manches-

ter Knowledge Capital Partnership (2002, p. 2, emphasis

added)––a partnership of city and regional economic

agencies––has recently explained that:

For areas like Manchester, manufacturing and

mass production––the mainstays of the industrial

revolution––are making way for an economy based

around knowledge, new ideas, expertise and entre-

preneurialism.

While as we have seen it is certainly the case thatmanufacturing employment is no longer what it once

was, it is not clear that the city’s economy is yet based

around ‘knowledge’ in the way the Partnership implies.

And yet, as others have argued, in order to effect this

‘transformation’ Manchester needs both a ‘highly skil-

led’ and a ‘flexible’ workforce: 6

Manchester’s greatest asset is its people. A largeand highly skilled labour pool distinguishes the city

from its national and international rivals (Man-

chestercalling.com 2002, p. 5).

Increasing trends of globalisation are reflected

through local economies . . . Several key trends re-

flected locally include an increasing need for labour

market flexibility (Manchester City Council, 2002,p. 11, emphasis added).

This emphasis is not altogether a surprise. As Jessop

(1998, pp. 90–91) explains about the bounding and

representation of the ‘local economy’, it is first and

foremost a process of imagination:

The basis of competitive strategies . . . is always andnecessarily an ‘imagined’ economy. The constitu-

tion of an economy involves its discursive construc-

tion as a distinctive object (of analysis, regulation,

governance, conquest or other practices) with defi-

nite boundaries, economic and extra-economic con-

ditions of existence, typical economic agents and

extra-economic stakeholders. The struggles to con-

stitute specific economies as subjects, sites andstakes of competition typically involve manipula-

tion of power and knowledge in order to establish

recognition of their boundaries and geometries.

6 Six ‘drivers’ are set out in the economic development plan for the

Manchester City Pride area, which encompasses the local authority

areas of Manchester, Salford, Tameside and Trafford. One of these

drivers is ‘creating a world class workforce’, an important development

for which has been the recent formation of Manchester City Council’s

own temp agency, Manchester Temps.

K. Ward / Geoforum 36 (2005) 223–240 231

As part of this entrepreneurial performance of re-

imaging and freeing-up the ‘local’ economy the change

in the city’s economic base, with the decline in manu-

facturing and the growth in service sector employment,has been met by a change in the way those in charge of

economic and labour market governance have talked

about the economy.

Moving on to the temporary staffing industry itself,

over half of all Manchester’s agencies are to be found in

the M1 and M2 postcodes in the centre of the city. This

area consists mainly of clerical and service sector gen-

eralists and specialists and a mix of international andlocal independent agencies. Two other areas contain a

noticeably high number of agencies: the first, to the

south of the city (M22) reflects the light-industrial

business done by some agencies at older, 1960s indus-

trial parks; the second, to the west of the city (M16,

M17, M30) maps straight on to Trafford Park. One of

the first and largest industrial parks in Europe (O’Toole,

1996), at its peak in 1945 the site of work for over 75,000people and a key node in the production network of

firms such as Brook Bond, Ford, Kellogg, and The

Guinness Company, its recent renovation has led to a

growth in business for agencies supplying workers in the

distribution and logistics segment.

In each of the three areas with a high concentration of

temporary staffing agencies, the geographies of contin-

gent labour they produce are quite different. So, forthose agencies located in the centre of the city workers

may be placed across the North West of England. The

managers I interviewed thought nothing of taking on

client firms twenty miles away. City centre agencies are

those that rely most on Manchester’s recent ‘transfor-

mation’ to attract workers and clients into their offices.

Being in the centre of the city means the agency is also in

the centre of the wider city-region and this centralitymatters to agencies placing workers at both the top

end––in the likes of accountancy or law––and the bot-

tom end––in the likes of the city’s many new call centres.

To do their business these agencies need to appear to be

plugged-into wider cultural, economic and social net-

works. Sometimes being part of this new ‘scene’ is be-

lieved by agency managers to compensate the workers

they place for working for low hourly rates in some ofthe most precarious forms of employment. City centre

agency owners and managers remain convinced that

there remained a ‘feel good factor’ in working in the

centre of Manchester (although of course workers may

actually ‘work’ elsewhere)––one that in part stems from

the city’s much-lauded urban renaissance.

Those agencies located on the outskirts of the city, or

on industrial parks, rely on a more geographicallystretched strategy to win corporate clients and assemble

a database of workers. There was no need for these

agencies to be in the centre of the city––they were

working in the less high profile, and often more spe-

cialist sectors such as distribution. Word-of-mouth was

still important between clients, agencies and workers––

as it is in the non-industrial sectors such as accoun-

tancy––and so is being visible to clients firms andworkers. In this case thought it is just that a client’s

factories are likely to be dotted around the city’s various

edge industrial parks, demanding that agencies locate

near clients. For workers moving from one agency to

another means more than a walk across the street, as is

the case at the city centre agencies. As other studies have

found, even in these examples, however, workers still

tended to register with more than one agency at a time(Druker and Stanworth, 2001).

What is clear from this section is that Manchester’s

economy has changed profoundly over the last three

decades, while at the same time those overseeing it have

reinforced the effects of wider changes in labour market

regulation, client hiring practices and the use of non-

standard employment contracts through emphasising

the virtues of flexible labour as a means of securing acompetitive advantage. In this political and economic

climate evidence suggests that Manchester’s temporary

staffing industry has prospered in the way ‘temping’ has

in other cities when economic restructuring and labour

market reorganisation have gone hand-in-hand (Peck

and Theodore, 2001). The paper now turns to the

interviews performed with agency owners and managers

to examine the industry’s modus operandi and configu-ration, situating it the context of the small number of

other industry studies.

3.1. Models of the temping business

There is almost no historical or contemporary anal-

ysis of the UK temporary staffing industry as an indus-

try. Some recent studies of temporary employment have

claimed to examine the strategies of agencies (Druker

and Stanworth, 2001; Forde, 2001; Gray, 2002), but

have come up short of providing a systematic diagnosis

of the current formation of the UK temporary staffing

industry (although see Ward, 2003). Despite the differ-ences that exist between the US and the UK, it is in the

US where the most advanced work on temporary staff-

ing has been carried out, and upon which this paper will

draw. Evidence from the US ‘temp market’ suggests that

the bottom end of that industry is fast moving, workers

being placed on a day-to-day basis on low hourly wage

rates, and that competition amongst agencies is placing

a continuing downward pressure on agency profit mar-gins (Peck and Theodore, 1998). Although there is no

evidence of such an extreme version of temporary

staffing in Manchester, cost does appear to be a defining

characteristic of the local industry (Table 3). As one

manager of a small independent, with branches in a

number of northern English cities, specialising in the

placement of ‘technical’ temps explained:

232 K. Ward / Geoforum 36 (2005) 223–240

I’ve found in . . .Manchester . . . that clients are onlybothered about price. Their most often quoted

objections are that ‘you’re all pulling from the same

pool of labour so why should I pay more to getsomebody from you when I can get the same guy

from X,Y, Z agency. In my opinion they are more

bothered about price than anything else (Interview

3, September 2001).

Another manager, this time at one of the largest

multi-national generalist temporary staffing agencies,

confirmed this cost-first competition in the city:

Our competitors are constantly reducing the rates

to what I think are ridiculously low and on a couple

of occasions we’ve lost out because of price. We are

not the most expensive but we aren’t the cheapest

and it is the cheapest that is winning at the moment

(Interview 7, October 2001).

The growth of smaller agencies performing their

business at the lower-end of the market has in part

intensified competition and led to the downward pres-

sure on prices, as one owner of an agency explained:

The explosion of very small, low cost opera-

tions . . . that don’t need a licence to operate has

meant that prices have been driven down. 7 You’vegot the wrong effect happening for the market that

we are in. We should be in a position now where––

well you probably know about market stratification

and basically it just follows that the traditional

skills, emergent skills and hard to fill skills and

you apportion a different band of charges. We used

to operate to that in the early days because there

was only ourselves and one other in the entire area.We could get people a lot easier and charge a lot

more for them because nobody else was doing what

we were doing. Competition exploded over the last

five years. When we had a boom everyone got on

the bandwagon and the only thing a lot of these

people can offer––because they cut corners––is a

cut price. There are agencies that will run an ad,

speak to somebody over the telephone and sendthem out to work, rather than doing the whole lot

because hey, they’re only in it to make money and

they’re not really bothered about providing a ser-

vice (Interview 3, September 2001).

7 The Conservatives withdrew the need for a licence to be obtained

to establish an agency, reinforcing the image to would be agency

owners that the barriers to industry entry are very low. There is also

then no government record of how many agencies are currently in

business.

Low barriers to entry mean that potentially there is

always another agency prepared to recruit and place

workers for less. Even towards the top-end of the

industry new entrants have sought to capture marketshare through pursing a low price strategy. As a man-

ager of an independent law agency bemoaned:

Everybody moves in and floods it, and makes a

mess of it and then none of us make enough money

then. It’s a very greedy industry and it is also a dog

eat dog very competitive industry. There is always

somebody at your heels trying to get at your busi-ness (Interview 11, October 2001).

And yet despite the claims of the largest agencies, it is

not always the smaller independents who lead the race

to the bottom: the larger independents are able to take

on some business at a loss in the short-term, forcing out

competitors and then taking over their market share,

particularly through national agreements (see Section3.3).

Lower-end relations in the Manchester temporary

staffing industry took two forms: for volume placements

contracts tended to be agreed, for ‘ones and twos’––that

is the placement of a small number of workers––

arrangements were often more informal (Table 4). In the

latter of these the workings of the temporary staffing

market were often built on relationships of trust, in theabsence of a formal contract, and often in the context of

unequal power relations between agency, worker and

client firm. Arrangements were often verbal. Supplying a

client firm one week did not always mean that an agency

would have that business the following week. As one

owner of an independent agency supplying industrial

workers explained:

There is nothing in writing from [large UK re-

tailer] . . . There is nothing in writing from any of

our clients that says ‘we will definitely use you this

time next week’. We call them contracts but we are

wrong to because they are not contact agreements

(Interview 13, October 2001).

The risk associated with the smoothing of the busi-ness cycle rested with the temporary staffing agency and,

inters alia, the worker. If the client firm decided it no

longer wanted temporary workers the following week

then there was little the agency, or the worker, could do.

And yet despite the power asymmetries inherent in this

non-contractual relationship, for this agency at least,

not being tied-into a contract did have some benefits:

We don’t have any contracts, but Blue Arrow,

Manpower and Kelly all the big ones very often

supply on a contract basis. That is a double-edged

sword because there are usually penalty clauses

Table 4

Restructuring in Manchester’s temporary staffing industry

Industry segment/characteristic Lower-hourly rate occupations

(clerical, light industrial, etc.)

Mid-range hourly rate occupa-

tions (Education, healthcare etc.)

Higher-end hourly rate occupa-

tions (Accountancy, Law etc.)

Barriers to entry Low Medium High

Degree of commodification High Medium Low

Volume High Low Low

Margins Low Low and high High

Service delivery -Minimum screening -Full screening -Full screening

-On-the-job training provision -No training -No training

Nature of agency-client firm

relations

Formal Formal Informal

Management style On-site and intensive Off-site and intensive Off-site and relaxed

Competition logic Cost Mix Non-cost

Market leaders Large multinational generalists Mix Niche specialists, either multina-

tional ‘brands’ or independents

Geographical location Out of town (for cost) and city

centre (for ‘high street’ market)

City centre (to be central but not

on ‘high street’)

City centre (to be close to clients

but not on ‘high street’)

K. Ward / Geoforum 36 (2005) 223–240 233

and it becomes a lot more involved. The [large util-

ity] contract that Pertemps have got for Call Centre

staff has got penalty clauses. We don’t have any be-

cause we haven’t got anything in writing and we

wouldn’t. If you are supplying a driver for example

you are charging the company whatever and you

are making two pounds an hour. That company

wants you to sign an agreement that says if thatperson doesn’t turn up you will pay a £500 penalty.

The odds aren’t great. You only need a couple of no

shows (Interview 13, October 2001).

Not only does the size of placements differ from one

part of the industry to the other: the pace of work ap-

pear also to be quite different, as Peck and Theodore

(1998, 2001) suggest in their studies of Chicago. Oneconsultant reflected on the change in the tempo of her

work as she moved within Manchester, from one of the

large generalist multi-nationals to work for a smaller

accountancy/financial agency:

The . . . thing that strikes me straight away is that it

is a lot, lot slower. I was used to getting 18 book-

ings a day. Here it could be two bookings a week(Interview 12, October 2001).

In part the pace of work was slower because com-

petition between agencies occurred on more than just a

cost basis. As the consultant went on to explain:

The first thing I would have to say is that the finan-

cial sector is not as cutthroat. It’s not as much as aDutch auction as the high street. At a high street a

client will sit and argue with you about a secretary

and ten pence an hour. She may say ‘Kelly have

quoted me 5.40 an hour and you are quoting me

5.50’. So at high street level you are arguing about

pence. In the financial industry I haven’t found that

clients come back debating cost as much. They ac-

cept that this is what it is going to cost them. I

thought dealing with accountants who are so penny

conscious, but they don’t seem to be as much

(Interview 12, October 2001).

What is evident from these interviews is that com-

petition took different forms in different niches ofManchester’s industry (Table 3). At the top end of the

temporary staffing industry competition between agen-

cies occurred not just in terms of price. Securing and

maintaining market share involved being members of

informal networks, of knowing the kind of ‘product’ the

firm wanted. Placing a worker involved the agency

knowing more about the client and their needs, as the

manager of the law agency explained:

It’s word of mouth really and reputation. In the

early days it was advertising and hoping you get

somebody who goes to a lot of agencies and being

very professional with them, quick off the mark

and getting them interviewed and placed. Basically

really looking after people and doing what you sayyou will for them. My motto has always been keep

your head down, work hard and to be honest with

people and I don’t think you can go wrong (Inter-

view 11, October 2001).

At the lower-end price appeared to matter more.

Generalists––those larger temporary staffing agencies

that tend to have a presence on the city centre highstreet––have recently looked with envy at both the

quantity and the quality of business agencies do in the

more specialised niches, such as law and accountancy.

From the outside, it appears to be higher profit margins,

for fewer placements, meaning less work for the agency

and its employees. For example, in Manchester’s

accountancy niche gross margins can sometimes be as

234 K. Ward / Geoforum 36 (2005) 223–240

high as 50%: for the generalist agencies margins can

sometimes be as low as 5%. Not surprisingly, those at

the top-end of the industry are keen to protect their

market. While moving up the value-chain might be anattractive, if near-impossible option to those below

(Peck and Theodore, 2002), the existing incumbents are

still unhappy at this prospect:

The world and his mother have switched on to the

fact that they can get higher bill rates and higher

margins with engineering business. Massive damage

has been caused by non-specialists getting involved

(Interview 3, September 2001).

However, the financial specialist agencies remained

confident they could still distinguish their ‘product’ from

that being sold by the generalists, even if there is evi-dence of the two segments converging in some cases:

There’s a couple like Reed who have an accoun-

tancy arm but the simple thing is any good accounts

is looking for a candidate will register with a spe-

cialist. So the generalists just don’t have the candi-

dates. They may be able to dabble but if a client

goes to them with a serious request then they don’t

have the candidates (Interview 12, October 2001).

The differences in the two models can, in some cases,

act as a barrier to the large generalist agencies entering

the higher-end segments:

I think it is too slow a turn around. They deal witha very quick turnaround. It’s quick money. The

margins are lower but its much higher volumes.

We could go two months and not be in profit but

we can ride that (Interview 11, October 2001).

Lower-end agencies are likely to continue to seek to

enter the higher-end segments. Some will make it, cap-

ture market share and get a piece of the higher margins,

lower volume business. Most of the agencies that do

their business in the more traditional ‘temp’ segments ofManchester are, however, destined to stay where they

are. Not only is this where the temping model has come

from but it is where it appears to be stuck. Evidence

from the US––the most mature of the national tempo-

rary staffing industries––points to an industry that is

unable to escape from its industrial past (Peck and

Theodore, 2002). Although in continental Europe

agencies have been more successful in moving up thehuman supply chain (Ward, 2001), UK urban labour

markets continue to resemble their US equivalents. And

for agencies this means low profit margins, high volume

placements will continue to be the industry’s staple diet.

3.2. Making moves: attempting to change the relationship

between client firm and temporary staffing agency

There is clear evidence that the nature of the rela-tionship between agencies and client firms is changing

(Peck and Theodore, 2002; Ward, 2003). In part

reflective of wider economic circumstances, as business

cycles influence labour demand and supply, neverthe-

less the last decade appears to have witnessed the

maturing of the UK industry, with the relationship

between client and supplier in some cases evolving to

become a closer one. This evolution lies behind some ofthe ways in which agencies increase their business. For

example, in terms of the ways in which agencies expand

the segments in which they place workers, a common

strategy is to respond to the demands of existing client

firms. Already doing business with an agency, clients

might begin to re-think their recruitment practices for

other areas of their workforce. They do this because

they can do, as Peck and Theodore (2001) argue aboutChicago. The practice of the agencies in regularising

temp work makes it––as a source of labour supply––

more attractive to client firms. As one manager ex-

plained about the movement into the industrial seg-

ment:

We had to do very little groundwork to introduce it

because we had a base of engineering clients whoused to ask us for labourers, storeman, and crane

drivers. So we could say to them ‘hey we’re doing

it now. We’ve got someone dedicated to finding

those people’. In the early days, 75% of the indus-

trial clients were also engineering clients anyway

(Interview 3, September 2001).

Once the agency has increased the number of indus-trial sectors they will supply workers to the next step is

often the adding-on of extra services. In their study of

Chicago, Peck and Theodore (1998, p. 671) found evi-

dence of what they referred to as ‘restructuring up’,

defined as ‘the increased strategic integration of the

management and scheduling systems of temp agencies

with their corporate clients’. In terms of deepening the

relationship with clients, this trend is evident in Man-chester:

At the end of the day, the smart HR professionals

realise that theirs is a very complex, multi-task

job and recruitment forms a very small part of

that. We are recruitment experts: that’s what we

do for a living. So it will pay to say ‘go and do

that for us’ because they can concentrate on themore important issues like motivating the work-

force they’ve got. So being bolted onto their

armoury is definitely a trend (Interview 3, Septem-

ber 2001).

K. Ward / Geoforum 36 (2005) 223–240 235

The range of services that we offer has grown and

grown . . . We are offering more [of the] entire

HR function now. For example, we do response

handling for adverts when we do advertising onbehalf of companies who don’t want their name

out or that just don’t want to deal with the re-

sponse from the adverts (Interview 2, October

2001).

As this manager of a large generalist agency ex-

plained, in order to be competitive in Manchester often

means that agencies have to keep on adding an extraservice here, an extra task there:

Over the last year or so we’ve been working with a

company . . . from Warrington. They have got HR

onsite but they’ve been recruiting a hundred people

at a time. That’s all coming through us. We’re

doing the advertising, we’re knocking the adverts

up, we’re getting the adverts published, we’re adver-tising under our name and their name, we’re doing

the initial screenings and the first formal interviews.

Basically, they give us the job and we give them a

shortlist two or three weeks later. So we’ve taken

all of that away from them (Interview 2, October

2001).

On the one hand, then, the relationship between theagency and the client firm appears to be becoming a

closer one. Agencies are trying to involve themselves in

the decision making process of clients, to make them-

selves almost irreplaceable (Ward, 2003). However, on

the other hand, within the client firm that agencies deal

with has begun to change. Agencies have begun to deal

with central human resource managers, as recruitment

decisions within firms have been centralised (Cully et al.,1999). Specialist procurement units have been estab-

lished in both the public and private sectors and are

increasingly in charge of negotiating with agencies over

margins (Druker and Stanworth, 2001). This trend has

disrupted existing local relations built on reciprocity and

trust. As managers at both an independent and a mul-

tinational agreed:

It’s down to relationships and trust . . . We are find-

ing with some of the bigger users is that when the

purchasing guys get in they are not interested in

trust: it comes down to the cheapest. That is a risk

in our business. It destroys part of it . . . and also

undervalues the service (Interview 5, September

2001).

I’d say it was more HR contacts. A lot of compa-

nies now have streamlined and said they no longer

want separate department heads and team leaders

to do recruitment because they are using five or

six agencies and they can’t control the costs and

don’t know what temps are from where. Certainly

a lot more companies go through HR. We can go

out and meet with the other people to get a betterunderstanding of the role but it is through HR

(Interview 7, October 2001).

It is clear that the relationship between the agency

and the client firm has changed in recent years. As the

Manchester industry continues to evolve so some

agencies are seeking out new ways of refashioning their

relationship with their clients. Widening the industrialsectors in which they place workers and adding on

extra services spreads risks for the agency and means

they become less of a temporary and more of a struc-

tural feature of a client’s business. For the client, cen-

tralising their relationship with agencies allows them to

extract cost concessions, as we see shall see in the next

section.

3.3. The effects of industry innovations in Manchester

One trend in the different temporary staffing indus-

tries, from North America to Western Europe, is the

emergence of national and global agreements, and with

them, preferred supplier lists. For the client firm, the

introduction of the agreements accompanies a renego-

tiation of margins downwards, for the corporate head-quarters of the largest agencies that tend to be party to

the agreements the benefits are guaranteed business. As

Druker and Stanworth (2001, p. 79) found in their

postal survey of UK agencies, ‘the rationale was cost-

based––the company expected a discounted rate because

it was purchasing in quantity.’ Manchester is embedded

in these global networks of agreements, its own market

shaped by the existence of preferred supplier lists. Insome cases this means Manchester’s local independent

agencies lose business, as they are unable to compete

with the large multinationals, with their presence in

multiple cities and countries:

We’re coming up against them all the time. It hap-

pened to us this week . . . They’ve only got two cen-

tres if you like, North east and North west, andpreviously what they’ve done is say ‘we’ve got our

North west agency and we’ve got our North east

agency’. Somebody has said to them ‘give it us all

and we’ll do it for nothing.’ That’s what is happen-

ing and it freezes you out of the market. Unless they

really struggle they won’t come back and even if

they do they’ll want you to do it, you know, some-

body there is getting 100 people for 50p and they’llcome back to you and say ‘can you do it for 50p?’

The whole market changes (Interview 5, September

2001).

236 K. Ward / Geoforum 36 (2005) 223–240

I was involved with [a large account] in Middlewich

with [a large agency] and they are called the master

vendor and all [the large client’s] business goes to

[the large agency] and then they take 70% of thoserequirements and feed the extra through to myself

and [a multi-national agency]. You just end up

building up there business. You’re not getting re-

spected as a supplier of [the client]: you’re a supplier

of [the large agency] and just building up their busi-

ness (Interview 8, October 2001).

The implications of the emergence of nationalagreements are not then limited to the particularities of

one agency’s relationship with a client firm. Rather, the

implications are more systemic, as the structure of the

market is changed. Once an agency in a particular seg-

ment of the market becomes involved in a national

agreement, then the local labour market for workers in

that niche changes, with rates of pay and margins

squeezed:

They sign these wonderful national agreements.

Everybody hates national agreements. Anybody

who is tied to them resents that fact that they have

a preferred supplier list. What happens is that you

will get a centralised call centre, we work 24/7 like

our clients and if a client needs to speak to us at

three on a Sunday morning that’s when he needsto talk. By four it’s too late. Nobody likes these

agreements. IF they call at three in the morning

they are talking to someone who arranged, with

Blue Arrow they are calling a centralised agency

and its ‘who are you again? What’s your site?’

Two hours later and they are still waiting for an

answer. It’s not efficient, it’s not effective but they

have to stay with it. That is a problem for us be-cause obviously we couldn’t provide national cover-

age and if you’ve got a company like [a large

retailer] who spend whatever it is on temps each

year and they go to Manpower, the margins are

shaved and shaved and shaved (Interview 13, Octo-

ber 2001).

In other situations, national agreements meld withexisting relationships to produce a hybrid type of

agreement. Local client managers find ways of circum-

venting national agreements and continue to work with

local independents. As an owner of an agency, placing

workers in the catering, leisure and tourism segments,

explained:

For example the [firm’s name] is one. All theirworkplaces have to work with a nominated supplier

and we are not the nominated supplier. But what

actually happens is that the unit at this level says

‘ok’ and send me 100 staff. So we are on their list

as an occasional supplier, which is like supplying

all the time (Interview 1, September 2001).

For those agencies party to national agreements the

challenge is to fill the contact without resorting to using

a second tier competitor (Ward, 2003). However, turn-

ing to a competitor can have its advantages. If they then

are not able to fill the contract the primary agency’s

stock with the client firm rises:

We’ve got a lot of national contracts. In one case

we have a service level agreement with them that

says ‘we will respond to you in this amount of time,we’ll get you the candidates’. If we can’t, then we

will turn to second-tier agencies. We have deals

with our competitors, basically. If we can’t find

the people, we’ll give them a shout at it. We’ve done

that a couple of times . . . and they’ve had no luck

either. But as we’re confident enough to say ‘if we

can’t find you someone, then we really don’t think

our competitors can’. The national deals arebecoming more and more important (Interview 2,

October 2001).

But the national agreements are not without theircontradictions. A local manager of a large multi-na-

tional agency explained how, while they would like to

maintain their non-national business, national contracts

nevertheless smooth income streams, providing a degree

of business stability:

We would rather as a company have more regional

and retail business definitely. But for any [agency]

you need a certain amount of stability and that’s

what [national agreements] offer us. I do know that

the large national accounts we only want at the

right price: there have been some occasions wherewe have large accounts and we don’t make any

money (Interview 7, October 2001).

The same agency was also aware that its relationshipwith other agencies is that of a ‘second tier supplier’

(Ward, 2003). It is happy with this arrangement as it can

take advantage of the inability of its competitors to

achieve the required standards:

We’ve had a number of occasions recently, compa-

nies have come to us, they’ve got agreements with

other agencies that they’ve not been to fulfil or they

have filled numbers but not quality. We are getting

quite a lot of business on the back of other agencies

not being able to deliver (Interview 7, October

2001).

While this might be the case in the generalist seg-

ments, in the legal niche the competition is so tough, and

K. Ward / Geoforum 36 (2005) 223–240 237

the absence of suitably qualified workers so great, that

sub-contracting, or performing as a ‘second tier’ sup-

plier is not considered an option:

It is to dog eat dog here. It would be lovely in fact I

did try it once and got my fingers burned. You give

them your information and it’s a very bitchy indus-

try and you give them an inch they take a mile. You

say I’m struggling have you got this person, it is

yeah yeah, you send their person in, they bill you,

but they will bully their temp for the information.

Who was your contact? Who did you work for?Next time that temp is free the agency will ring

the client and say ‘the temp you had through [the

agency] six months ago you really liked her I’ve

got her free do you want her?’ (Interview 11, Octo-

ber 2001).

In Manchester there is evidence of some parts of itstemporary staffing industry being re-made due to the

national agreements reached elsewhere between agencies

and client firms. This is particularly the case in those

segments of the market where a large numbers of

workers are placed on a daily and weekly basis. Form-

alising or regularising relations allows client firms to do

their business with agencies at lower margins. For the

agency national agreements insulate some parts of themarket from local independents and provide the named

agency with guaranteed market share.

4. Conclusion

Something strange occurred at Manchester City

Council’s 2004 annual budget debate. For the first time

in its history, and during a ‘stormy’ event (Manchester

Metro News March 19 2004, p. 21), the Labour-led local

authority was forced to defend spending £15 million, or

6% of its total wage bill, on hiring workers through

temporary staffing agencies. To the consternation of

local public sector union representations and oppositionpoliticians, Manchester City Council admitted that it

would not be able to delivery some of its services, par-

ticularly in social services, without the workers supplied

by agencies. In light of this admission, it appears that in

Manchester at least the future provision of public ser-

vices and of the city’s temporary staffing industry is

deeply intertwined.

Manchester like a host of North American andWestern European cities has struggled to adjust to the

new realities (and the accompanying material and dis-

cursive construction) of twenty-first century economic

globalisation. As the city’s manufacturing base con-

tracted during the 1970s and 1980s, so those involved in

its economic development have had to re-think their

approaches. Emphasis has increasingly switched to re-

imaging the city’s space economy as consisting of flexi-

ble, innovative, and highly competitive individuals and

firms across the labour market. As the city’s various

partnerships have attempted to orchestrate a re-indus-trialisation of the economy––through service sector

expansion––so they have helped one of the city’s oldest

(and still least transparent and poorly understood)

industries.

In the last thirty years the number of agencies in

Manchester has increased by almost 300%. As the old

certainties of the Fordist era, such as permanent

employment, sheltered internal labour markets, andsteady career progression over the lifecycle, have begun

to disappear from the economic landscape, so business

has boomed for the city’s temporary staffing agencies. In

the bottom, middle and top end of the labour market

temporary staffing agencies have begun to refashion the

very logic of the employment relationship. In a growing

number of industrial segments, from the high hourly

rates of the IT consultant through to the lower rates ofindustrial packers, agencies have acted to re-regularise

labour relations. As more and more firms become clients

of agencies so employment opportunities outside of

what Bourdieu (1998, p. 85) terms a new ‘mode of

domination’ are reduced. Workers in some sectors are

often left with few alternatives but to go to a temporary

staffing agency to gain work, as agencies are at once the

product of the wider re-regulation of the UK employ-ment system and agents in the active bedding-down of

deregulation in city-region economies (Beynon et al.,

2002).

In Manchester the type of business agencies do shows

signs of changing. This paper has focused on three ways

in which the city’s temporary staffing industry is evolv-

ing. First, that as the number of agencies has expanded

so a number of business models have emerged. In theUS there has been a tendency to focus on the low-end

model of day-to-day placements, low-margins and

aggressive forms of competition (Peck and Theodore,

1998, 2001). While this model may well be prevalent in

the UK, this research also points to a variegated

industry in which different models co-exist. Second, this

paper points to an industry that is continuing to mature.

As placement margins are squeezed agencies havesought to switch, either attempting to move into new

occupations or into higher value-add service provision.

Both these responses mean that agencies and clients

become tied into deeper and more complicated relations.

Third, this paper has revealed the way that wider

industry agreements interact with existing local ways of

doing business. In some cases there is evidence of the

replacement of old with new agreements: in otherexamples hybrid arrangements appear to have emerged,

reinforcing the need to pay attention to local contin-

gencies and emphasising the virtues of intensive methods

in uncovering processes of change.

238 K. Ward / Geoforum 36 (2005) 223–240

And Manchester is not alone. Evidence from else-

where in the UK and in the US suggests that urban

economies are sites of rapid growth in temporary staff-

ing (on Chicago see Peck and Theodore, 2001; on De-troit see Gottfried and Fasenfest, 2001; on Leeds see

Forde, 2001; on Silicon Valley see Carnoy et al., 1997;

Benner, 2002). In light of the global growth in the

temporary staffing industry (Ward, 2001, 2004a,b; Peck

et al., 2004) it is possible to use the example of Man-

chester to make some more general observations on the

contemporary restructuring of urban economies and the

growth in temporary staffing (as perhaps an indicativeexample of the growth in producer services).

First, that as urban economies undergo restructuring

so to do the likes of the temporary staffing industry:

sectors who very business is intricately linked with the

ups and downs of the economic cycle. As Manchester’s

manufacturing base has been eroded in the last three

decades, so its temporary staffing industry has morphed

to meet the needs of the emergent industrial structure. Itis now a highly differentiated industry, recruiting,

screening and placing workers as easily in high-paid,

professional sectors as in low-paid manual occupations.

The industry’s growth reflects and at the same time

reinforces the changes in the local industrial structure. It

both facilitates economic restructuring and benefits

from it. And, as others have illustrated, although not

examined in this paper, this growth has importantimplications for local workers (Gottfried, 1992; Parker,

1994; Rogers, 2000).

Second, the growth in the business done by Man-

chester’s temporary staffing agencies reflects the nature

of wider contemporary UK employment relations

(Beynon et al., 2002; Burchell et al., 2002). Rising de-

unionisation, reduced worker coverage by collective

agreements, the erosion of employer commitment topermanent employment, rising in-work insecurity, and

the fragmentation of labour market institutions have all

been associated with, contributing to and being aided

by, the growth in Manchester’s temporary staffing

industry. It is perhaps not surprising then that ‘temp

agencies have thrived in the disorganizing and deregu-

lating labor-market conditions of recent decades’ (Peck

and Theodore, 2001, p. 477). Once the archetypalindustrial city, where work and identity went hand in

hand (Briggs, 1963), and where the terms and conditions

of most, but not all of course, workers were safe-

guarded, Manchester’s economy now appears to consist

of a growing number of highly differentiated contingent

labour markets (Greater Manchester Low Pay Unit,

2002).

Third, the growth in Manchester’s temporary staffingindustry appears to reveal how the outsourcing of hiring

and firing practices has caught on amongst firms of all

sizes. Successive waves of downsizing, reengineering,

internal labour market dismantling and functional out-

sourcing means firms have become used to managing

rather than actually performing certain tasks. In doing

their business temporary staffing agencies contribute to

the wage and employment inequalities that exist incontemporary urban economies, and that have been

analysed by others (Burchell et al., 2002; Conley, 2002).

In affecting change in its economic structure and its

governance Manchester’s elite has (perhaps albeit inad-

vertently) supported one of the city’s oldest and least

understood industries. After a period of relatively stable

and regularised employment relations the return to more

individualised, precarious and insecure employmentcontracts has been facilitated by the growth and the

diversification of Manchester’s temporary staffing in-

dustry. This paper has examined some of the character-

istics of this industry: despite being effected by the

vagaries of the economic cycle the industry continues to

expand. The mini-recession of 2002 hit the UK tempo-

rary staffing industry (Recruitment and Employment

Confederation, 2003). And yet the owners and managersof Manchester’s temporary staffing agencies echoed the

sentiments of their peers in the Chicago industry: that

both the economic ups and the downs of contemporary

capitalism provide the context in which agencies can

increase their business (Peck and Theodore, 2001).

Acknowledgements

The British Academy and the University of Man-

chester financed the research reported here, while Mags

Andersen, James Farr and Micaela Mazzei provided

research assistance for the projects. Thanks to Chris

Benner, David Fasenfest, and Nikki Townsley for

helpful comments on a first draft of this paper which

was given at the Association of American Geographers

annual conference in New Orleans 2003, and to theinsightful comments of three anonymous referees and, in

particular, to ‘Reviewer A’ who kept pushing: I am

afraid that I doubt I answered your concerns fully––ei-

ther empirically or theoretically––but I will keep trying.

Finally, thanks to Andy Leyshon, as editor of Geoforum,

who oversaw the whole process with the minimum of

fuss: I remain responsible for the contents of the paper.

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