Word: fromstein
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Once contingent workers appear in a company, they multiply rapidly, taking the places of permanent staff. Says Manpower chairman Mitchell Fromstein: "The U.S. is going from just-in-time manufacturing to just-in-time employment. The employer tells us, 'I want them delivered exactly when I want them, as many as I need, and when I don't need them, I don't want them here.' " Fromstein has built his business by meeting these demands. "Can I get people to work under these circumstances? Yeah. We're the ATMs of the job market...
...Eastern Europe. U.S. executives have taken to talking of global "market prices" for employees, as if they were investing in cattle futures. "We understand it's just business, but it's still awfully demeaning," says Deb Donaldson, a part-time retail sales clerk in Moline, Illinois. Manpower's Fromstein dismisses such complaints of exploitation, pointing out that his own profit margins are razor thin (1.3%). Says he: "We are not exploiting people. We are not setting the fees. The market is. We are matching people with demands. What would our workers be doing without us? Unemployment lines? Welfare? Suicide...
...making cutbacks a way of life. Even as students, new graduates and other job seekers poured into the labor market, the U.S. lost a disheartening 117,000 jobs in June. So far this year, corporate America has shed an average of 1,500 positions a day. Says Mitchell Fromstein, president of Manpower Inc., the largest U.S. temporary help service: "In any company with more than 1,000 employees, it's almost a given that some kind of restructuring is taking place. At best, they are just not hiring and losing head count by attrition...
...many parts of the globe has suffered because so many decisions have been put on hold. In the U.S. the specter of a major war has created a virtual paralysis in an economy already plagued by recession, deep budget deficits and troubled banks. "It's frightening," said Mitchell Fromstein, CEO of Manpower, the employment-services company. "We're watching a war being superimposed on top of a recession. People are just frozen in place until they see what it is they're facing...
COLONIAL ATTITUDES. When Britain's Blue Arrow employment firm took over the much larger Milwaukee-based Manpower in 1987, the new owners made little effort to understand the market they were entering, according to Manpower chairman Mitchell Fromstein. He even took offense at the Blue Arrow company newsletter, which he refused to distribute to his 1,400 U.S. offices because it was "poor in quality, provincial and British in nature with little articles about the soccer team in South Wales." Friction grew to the point that Blue Arrow tried to fire Fromstein, but in a battle for control he wound...