In this brief video, Jim Essey speaks on the role TemPositions’ Founder and Chairman Dick Essey had in the formation of the American Staffing Association as well as how the association’s name came to be the ASA.
Transcript:
I’ve been involved in some way with the industry since I was nine years old and that was when my dad started a staffing business in 1962, and that was around the time that there was some thought that maybe the industry needed some kind of a body that would help them they wanted to have a voice with legislators so they were looking for sort of small players who in their local markets with no legislators. So they looked at firms like my dad’s. Even back then he had just started so they asked him to get involved there are few other firms that they all got involved and they sort of had this concept of having both big players and small players together around a table talking about issues and then advancing the interests of the industry with legislators and so that was sort of the early start of what became ASA. It’s gone through a number of name changes over the years it was first called ITS: the institute for temporary services, a sort of a strange name, and so then they called it NATS. And NATS at that time was the National Association of Temporary Services spelled and 80s but then in the literature people started talking about this thing called staffing so National Association of temporary services didn’t have staffing in it. So someone came up with the great idea, well we’ll just add another s and then we can become the national association of temporary and staffing services. Genius, problem solved then I remembe,r I think it was Kathy Hanratty who is the chairman of the board realized we really need to rebrand ourselves with a different name and we became the American staffing Association and we’ve been that way ever since.
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