Making Manchester `flexible': competition and change in the temporary staffing industry

According to local economic and political commentators, Manchester's economy is booming. Employment is growing, investment 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 economic 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.