Office temping that began as housekeeping: founding Temporary Center (1976)

A founding where the institution chased the business

The heart of this founding is that the business itself brought into being a way of working the law had not yet given shape. Worker dispatch was not an industry born after a statute defined it. The demand sitting between women who wanted to work and firms that wanted to smooth the peaks and troughs of clerical work, Nambu first joined together inside the vessel of a housekeeping contract; and only on the record of that trade did the Worker Dispatch Law, a decade later, lend the practice its institutional outline. The business outran the institution, and the institution came chasing after it. The pioneer of temporary staffing was built in exactly that order.

Yet the founding ideal of “women’s return to society” would not, in the Japan that followed, settle into a simple tale of success. Even as dispatch widened women’s participation in the workforce, it came to carry a separate charge — the entrenchment of non-regular employment. The business that one founder’s ideals and drive had opened up would in time become a listed company, and amid the tensions of the capital market and activist shareholders it would be asked to reconcile scale against profit, and social purpose against shareholder value. This starting point — translating demand into a business ahead of the institution — was also the first step of a question the human-services industry would go on carrying.