Friday, Aug. 04, 1967
Part Time Full Blast
When a Detroit automaker adopted a new group insurance plan not long ago, the insurance company found itself facing an Everest of clerical work: individual policy certificates had to be made out for each of 330,000 employees. What to do? Why, call for the Kelly Girls, of course. They came on, 125 strong, and in 15 days polished off a job that would have kept regular staffers on overtime for weeks.
In helping U.S. firms over such peaks, Kelly Girls and their competitors have built the "temporary help" business from its slender postwar beginnings into an industry with revenues of $500 million a year and a roster of some 1,250,000 part-time workers. The leaders got under way in the mid-1940s--Kelly Services Inc. in Detroit, Manpower Inc. in Milwaukee. Today they are both public companies, a far cry from the days when the industry really began to surge in the late 1950s, and the general expansion of U.S. business began to stretch the supply of skilled office workers.
Filling those needs, Manpower Inc.'s 191 company-owned offices (another 312 are run by independent franchised operators) have increased sales by 500% to $61 million over the past decade. Much of that growth is the result of a push overseas, and the company's busiest office is in Paris, where Manpower took in $9.1 million last year. On the other hand, Brothers William Russell Kelly, 62, and Richard Kelly, 56, who are chairman and vice chairman of Kelly Services, have kept their girls at home--and apparently for good reason. Kelly leads the field in growth, with sales up a dramatic 800% over the past ten years to $59 million in 1966; last year's net income was just under $2 million.
No Fringes. The part-time business is going full blast because many corporations, squeezed by shortages of office workers and rising wages, are not even trying to keep full staffs at the typewriters. When the need arises, they happily pay a premium for part-time help. In New York, for example, a temporary-help supplier might pay a typist the going rate of $2.50 an hour, but the company she works for is billed for $3.30--a 30% markup.
At those rates, some clients might feel piqued that the "temporaries" do not always look like the pert young things Kelly has been sending to plant gladioli and publicity in city parks under something called "the Kelly Beautification Program." The average temporary is a housewife, ex-secretary, somewhere "over 35" in age (one Seattle Kelly Girl is 81). But employers figure they come out about even with the temporaries, since permanent employees are expensive to recruit and command fringe benefits that add a third or more to basic wage rates.
Not Just Warm Bodies. Kelly loftily contends that it is not just hiring out people. Instead, it is dealing in labor "systems." Tapping a work force of 130,000 through 276 offices in the U.S., the company provides teams for programming computers, can muster 50-man cadres for overnight inventories of department stores on a few hours' notice. Tellers trained in a special Kelly program help banks in 40 cities get through Monday and Friday rush hours. And an IBM 360 computer at Kelly's Detroit headquarters keeps track of a roster of Kelly technicians, including draftsmen and engineers, chemists and commercial artists.
So earnestly has Kelly been expanding that it almost overlooked a lag in the company name. Last year it dropped "Girl" from its old name, "Kelly Girl Service Inc." It was deferring to its growing number of males, who had smarted under the tag of those "Kelly Girl Men."
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