Two lawyers in Milwaukee built a business on the idea that labor could be rented by the day.
In 1946, William Russell Kelly founded Russell Kelly Office Service in Detroit, Michigan, initially sending his own employees to work at client companies on short-term assignments.1 Around the same time, Elmer Winter and Aaron Scheinfeld, two lawyers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, founded Manpower Inc. in 1948 after struggling to find a temporary secretary for their own law firm.2
Both companies formalized an arrangement that had previously been informal. Workers were employed by the agency, not by the company where they performed the work. This triangular relationship, employee-agency-client, created a new category of labor.
Kelly's company, later renamed Kelly Services, initially marketed itself to businesses by sending workers it called Kelly Girls, reinforcing the gendered assumption that temporary labor was women's work, suited for filing, typing, and reception.1
Manpower grew aggressively through franchising. By the 1960s, it had become one of the largest employers in the United States.2 The temporary staffing industry expanded from clerical work into manufacturing, healthcare, technology, and virtually every sector of the economy.
The temp agency model separated the worker from the employer in a way that reduced the employer's obligations. Client companies gained labor without the costs of benefits, severance, or long-term commitment. Workers gained flexibility at the cost of stability, benefits, and legal protections tied to a direct employment relationship.
By the early twenty-first century, the global temporary staffing industry employed tens of millions of workers annually, generating revenue measured in hundreds of billions of dollars.3
The Typist / Secretary was among the first roles the temp agency commodified. The industry's early marketing treated these workers as interchangeable units of labor, available on demand and disposable when the assignment ended.