Manpower

Manpower is the temporary-work agency through which Anthony Casati’s precarious employment is organized. A caseworker advises him about whether to leave a costly job, while the prospect of agency reprimand later hangs over his attendance record. The episodes place Manpower between workers and workplaces: it offers access to successive jobs, but that access does not spare them from low pay, unstable placements, or the pressure to remain useful and compliant.

Casework and Advice

After a succession of temporary jobs, Anthony tells the woman at Manpower handling his case that his kitchen job at the prefecture is far from home and that almost all his wages go toward petrol. She advises him not to quit, warning that doing so would make a bad impression. He follows her advice for eight weeks, getting up at dawn to drive sixty miles, work four hours, and drive back. The arrangement brings in barely four thousand francs a month. The episode shows the limits of the help available to him: the caseworker can counsel him on how to preserve his standing, but the advice leaves intact the punishing commute and the poor return on his time.

Anthony’s reason for continuing is also personal and immediate. He fears that cashing the army’s check would make the money vanish quickly and return him to dependence on his mother; finding work feels preferable to that prospect. Temporary jobs seem ordinary in his circle, and his mother treats working oneself to exhaustion as normal. Manpower’s intervention thus occurs within a broader expectation that accepting whatever work is available is better than risking dependence, even when the job’s costs leave Anthony little room to get ahead.

Placements Across Workplaces

Anthony’s assignments form a sequence rather than a settled career. He cleans bathrooms at the Saint-Vincent clinic and an abattoir, works as a school janitor, and joins the kitchen crew at the prefecture. After that, he specializes in laundry and cleaning at nursing homes, passing through five in three months. Further placements take him to a warehouse, Liqui Moly, and a print shop before he reaches the Gordon factory, where he finds a more or less permanent workshop job.

The range of work makes the agency’s function concrete: Anthony moves between institutions and kinds of labor, from sanitation and care work to factory production. Yet the transition to Gordon does not immediately erase the instability of temporary employment. In the workshop, he stacks metal sheets, rods, and grillwork into a precise arrangement for industrial ovens; the factory’s supervisors keep watch over both established workers and a continuing stream of temporary staff. Those temps can be sent away at even a slight downturn. Manpower is therefore part of a labor system in which workers may be circulated among jobs while their presence at any one workplace remains conditional.

Discipline and Financial Precarity

The agency also figures in Anthony’s fear of being disciplined. At Gordon, he realizes he has accumulated a two-hour shortfall because he has often arrived late. With the shift pattern making the lost time impossible to recover, he expects a pay deduction and a stern message from human resources; he also anticipates that Manpower will reprimand him. The possibility of a warning is not abstract: Anthony already lives close to the edge financially, so even a small loss of wages threatens a budget with little slack.

His later figures make that exposure plain. He earns seven thousand francs a month, pays half of it in rent, and faces costs for his car, petrol, cigarettes, groceries, and credit. His monthly outgoings leave him at least five hundred francs overdrawn. He has arranged with the bank to avoid charges, but his ability to remain financially independent still depends on its patience. The job pays for material necessities, including his car, refrigerator, bed, leather sofa, and television, while the recurring cycle of payday, repayment, and overdraft keeps that independence fragile. In this context, a reprimand from the agency matters because attendance and income are closely linked.

The Agency in the Workplace

Manpower is not only present through Anthony’s caseworker. At the factory canteen, a worker points out that Anthony is himself a temporary employee and adds that he, too, was dispatched by Manpower. The exchange makes temporary status a shared condition among workers rather than an isolated stage in Anthony’s employment history. It also shows the agency’s reach into the workplace: people working alongside one another may arrive through the same intermediary even when their tasks and circumstances differ.

The narrative gives no account of Manpower’s internal organization or broader policies. Its significance instead emerges through these specific encounters: a caseworker’s advice, the circulation of workers among short-term jobs, and the fear that a missed hour could bring both a deduction and a reprimand. The agency’s role is practical but ambivalent. It connects Anthony and other workers to employment, yet the jobs it mediates offer little security against economic downturn or financial exhaustion.