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INTERNATIONAL CONFEDERATION OF FREE TRADE UNIONS (ICFTU)
ICFTU OnLine...
185/980907/LD/PQ/SG
Call centres - the new assembly lines
By Luc Demaret with Pat Quinn and Samuel Grumiau
By the year 2000 hundreds of thousands of workers worldwide will be
employed by telephone call centres. It is becoming the new version of
the assembly line, and trade unions need to pay attention.
Brussels, September 7 1998 (ICFTU OnLine): Raphael, a 24-year-old
qualified translator, spends his day on the telephone. Every morning at
7 o'clock, he dons his headphones, sits in front of a microphone and
gets ready to reply to inquiries from the clients of the express courier
firm that hired him three months ago.
Most of the callers have no idea that he is speaking from Dublin.
Clients in Paris, Brussels, Bonn or Amsterdam dial the "green" number
that automatically connects them to the "call centre" based in one of
the poorest districts of the Irish capital.
Thanks to his computer, Raphael can quickly arrange for a parcel to be
collected in Geneva, track down a stray package in Bangkok, or inform
his correspondent of the prices charged by a carrier in New York or the
time to allow for a deliver from Bujumbura. He spends an average of one
to two minutes per client. In eight hours he will have dealt with about
200 telephone calls.
Communications factories
Continually under stress, closely supervised to the extent that the
supervisor often listens in to his calls, insulted by angry clients,
Raphael is one of a new generation of workers whose numbers are
multiplying thanks both to technological innovation and the falling cost
of telecommunications. A new generations whose working conditions bear
a suspicious resemblance to the assembly lines of the early industrial
era. Some are already comparing these "teleadvisers" to the skilled
labourers and describe the call centres as "communications factories".
Their numbers are set to increase over the next few years. While
Ireland is home to many of the European call centres - and is stepping
up the incentives to attract US companies - the United Kingdom is still
by far the leader of this field in Europe.
According to a report* prepared by the International federation of
commercial, professional and technical employees (FIET) more than half
the 6,000 call centres in Europe are based in Great Britain. The
birthplace of the industrial revolution has 38 per cent of the world
market, according to other sources.
Paul Cresswell, director general of Sitel UK predicts that "in five
years from now call centres in the United Kingdom will have more
employees than all of heavy industry put together - mines, iron and
steel, the car industry...". Sitel is a US telecommunications company
which runs 40 per cent of Britain's call centres, an industry which has
somewhere between 160,000 and 200,000 employees in the country. By 2000
this figure will have risen to about a quarter of a million according to
the Datamonitor agency.
The call centres were pioneered by the financial sector, although others
were quick to emulate. While banks and insurance companies have for some
time offered their clients the possibility of obtaining information or
carrying out transactions from their home and outside working hours, today
it's not just your banking that can be done by telephone. Travel,
clothing, furniture, household equipment, after-sales services, computer
support etc. are all covered by the growing number of enterprises that
offer a free telephone service for the consumer, often accessible seven
days a week and 24 hours a day. The Oréal beauty products call centre in
France gets more than 3,500 calls a day, including Saturdays. The 30
"teleadvisers", whose number is to grow to 300, act as long-distance
beauticians at the end of a phone line.
If you telephone a call centre, it will probably be a woman that
answers. In most centres, three quarters of telephonists are women and
many are under 30. Based in industrialised regions where unemployment
is particularly high, the call centres are a godsend for thousands of
workers back on the job market. The employers' main incentives are the
low wages, economies of scale and the simplicity of installation. The
Dublin-based call centres of the express courier giants such as Federal
Express and UPS provide a service for clients in Germany, Switzerland,
the Netherlands and France. The "German" section of UPS in Dublin
employs no less than 150 telephone operators for much lower salaries
than those paid across the Rhine. The same applies to the United States
where "toll free calls" are directed to the Caribbean.
In Great Britain call centres have enabled enterprises to "transfer
staff away from the most expensive regions such as London or south-east
England" observes Alastair Hatchett of Incomes Data Services, a British
agency that specialises in studying the service and employment market.
Callers making telephone inquiries from London will probably hear a
Scottish accent at the other end of the line, as British Telecom (BT)
has chosen to base its service in Glasgow. Barclaycall, Barclay Bank's
tele-banking service, recently announced the opening of a new call
centre in north-west England where it plans to employ some 2,000 people.
Working conditions
Call centres have changed the pattern of white-collar working so much
that the highly respected London School of Economics decided to study the
subject. Its researchers have already commented on the
"industrialisation" of a job where the working conditions resemble those
of a blue collar more than a white collar worker: productivity bonuses,
round-the-clock shiftwork, overtime, etc.
A telephonist at a UPS call centre can earn about 1200 dollars net per
month. But it is possible to add to that another 100 dollar monthly
bonus for each language used other than English or whatever their
mother-tongue is that they are working with. There are also bonuses
based on turnover and on courtesy to clients.... "So the bonuses become
a bit of a lottery" one teleadviser told us. "You never know in advance
who is calling or whether it will be lucrative." As for their level of
courtesy, it is left to the supervisor to judge, by listening in during
the day to his staff's calls.
Everything is aimed at speeding up the pace: incoming calls must be
responded to within fifteen seconds, the conversation must be kept as
short as possible and, to add to the stress, each operator has a console
in front of them with flashing lights which indicate calls that are
waiting. "The possibilities for monitoring the behaviour and measuring
output in call centres are amazing to behold. The 'tyranny of the
assembly line' is but a Sunday-school picnic compared with the control
that management can exercise in computer technology" comments Sue Fernie
of the London School of Economics.
The new communications production line poses many challenges for the
trade unions. In some industries the call centres are an obvious threat
to jobs, as the New Zealand financial workers' unions have found. In
replying to a FIET questionnaire, they summarised the situation as
follows: "clients are encouraged to use the telephone rather than go to
their bank and their call will not go to their branch. Many banks have
closed down branches and cut jobs."
On the other hand, FIET admits, the growing use of call centres in other
sectors is a source of new jobs. Jobs which can regenerate regions that
have been brought to their knees by mass unemployment.
Trade unions therefore need to develop a strategy that aims both at
protecting existing jobs where they are under threat, and at organising
workers in the new call centres.
It does not appear to be an impossible mission. The call centres are
the modern version of mass production, usually fertile ground for the
trade unions. Centres often employ several hundred operators in vast
premises reminiscent of assembly lines. Furthermore, many enterprises
that decide to set up call centres already have a unionised workforce,
covered by collective agreements that could extend to their telephone
operators.
Occupational health problems
The sometimes deplorable working conditions in the call centres should
also encourage employees to turn to the unions. The first signs of
occupational health problems are beginning to emerge. The FIET's
British affiliate in the banking sector, BIFU, has drawn attention to
the increased risk of Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) to which telephone
operators are exposed because of their constant use of the computer. The
union has also detected another problem: more and more telephone
operators in the call centres are losing their voices. The worse
affected are the part-time employees notes BIFU "who may work up to five
hours without a break". Coughs, irritated throats and respiratory
problems are the first symptoms of an infection which could become an
"occupational" disease if nothing is done.
The trade unions aren't always given red-carpet treatment, however.
Barclaycall is fiercely opposed to a trade union presence in its new
English site and in Germany the telebanking arms of Citycorps and
Commerzbank are excluded from the collective agreement covering the
banking sector. Some employers play on the rapid turnover of staff,
linked to the stress of the job and the lack of career prospects to
discourage unionisation. Yet unions seem determined to rise to the
challenge and seize this rare opportunity to organise a new sector.
*Teleworking and trade union strategy, FIET, Geneva 1997.
Contact: ICFTU-Press at: ++32-2 224.02.12 (Brussels). For more
information, visit our website at: (http://www.icftu.org).
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