By this account, in 1948, Scheinfeld conceived of Manpower, arrived at the name and early logo over lunch with friend and advertiser Marvin Frank, and invited Winter to invest as a minority stockholder and co-founder.

[3] Historian Louis Hyman says Manpower started supplying workers to replace unexpected absences like people calling in sick.

Due to the limited size of this market, it then attempted to expand to replacing full-time workers wholesale with rented talent, but found resistance in an era when corporations valued stability, and subscribed to the notion that married white men needed stable jobs to be breadwinners for their families.

“To avoid union opposition, they developed a clever strategy, casting temp work as “women's work,” and advertising thousands of images of young, white, middle-class women doing a variety of short-term office jobs.”[14] In 1961, Manpower spent $1 million to place advertisements in Sunday papers across the country featuring their “White Glove Girls”.

They symbolize quality and efficiency.”[15] A 1962 advertisement[16] from TIME features model Judy Newton[15] who was the public face of Manpower in the 1960s as “The Girl in the White Gloves”.

In “The Temp Economy: From Kelly Girls to Permatemps in Postwar America”, Hatton posits that the images in these advertisements were carefully curated to be “respectable sex symbols” and very purposefully not displaying images of men or nonwhites and emphasizing that the White Glove Girls were “specially certified” as code for white & middle-class and not recent immigrants or black migrants.

[21] In 1968, Manpower Technical is established, expanding to offer specialized temporary employees outside office clerical and industrial settings.

[3] On August 18, 1975, upon the retirement of co-founder Elmer Winter, the Parker Pen Company announced its acquisition of Manpower for $28.2 million.

A new subsidiary of Parker would own 80% of the common stock, with the remaining 20% purchased by Mitchell S. Fromstein, Manpower Chairman of the Board.

Along with the increased offer price, Blue Arrow agreed that the company would operate as a subsidiary retaining the Manpower name in the US, the Milwaukee office would remain open, and that Fromstein would stay on.

[27] In the intervening weeks before accepting the Blue Arrow offer, Fromstein attempted to negotiate a joint venture with Adia S.A. to blunt the takeover; however, the Swiss employment firm decided not to proceed.

[38] On January 31, 1990, Blue Arrow PLC announced its intent to re-incorporate in the United States as Manpower Inc. and to return its corporate headquarters to Milwaukee.

[3] In January 2000, Manpower acquired Elan Group Ltd., a provider of IT staffing solutions[buzzword] based in the UK with operations in the Netherlands, Ireland, Switzerland, Germany, and Hong Kong, for $146.2 million.

[41] During 2000, Manpower launched The Empower Group, an independent operating division providing consulting services to multinational corporations in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and the US.

[42] On July 9, 2001, Manpower closed on its acquisition of Jefferson Wells International, Inc., a provider of professional accounting and tax services in the US and Canada, for $174 million.

[50] The COMSYS acquisition included their Tapfin brand, expanding Manpower's investment in RPO and Managed Service Provider (MSP) offerings.