Mr. Steinerman: U.S. temporary help continues to be strong, despite a sluggish pace in overall private payrolls. Temporary help disproportionately benefits from a low-growth environment. Temporary help returned to healthy sequential growth in October and has shown solid sequential growth every single month through May. When you take all this into account, temporary help has reached a year-over-year growth of 16% in May. Also June temporary help seems to be showing further growth. We keep databases for many major, non-U.S. geographies of temporary help. While the U.S. was first to turn positive year-over-year in February 2010, other temporary help markets around the world turned positive shortly thereafter, such as France. We would point out that one market that had been a laggard cyclically, the Dutch temporary help market, just turned positive year-over-year for the first time. In contrast, Japanese temporary help is one market that continues to lag. So temporary help is moving ahead overall, despite the general labor malaise.
TWST: What do you cover in outsourcing?
Mr. Steinerman: In some ways, we think all of our coverage companies provide outsourced services. We cover outsourced staffing services; we research Iron Mountain, which is records management outsourcing, and we cover American Reprographics, which offers reprographics outsourcing. The way we describe our research is business and education services, and the key word is "services," as in outsourced services. When looking at an outsourced services subsegment, the first thing we assess is how large is the addressable subsegment and is a trend towards increased outsourcing driving secular growth? For example, we think staffing has a higher secular growth profile than uniform services, which are two outsourced services sectors that we cover.
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