INTERNATIONAL CONFEDERATION OF FREE TRADE UNIONS (ICFTU)
ICFTU OnLine... 208/991104/LD
Thursday, November 4 is Call Centre Action Day being organised by the gloal trade union federations FIET and the Communications International (http://www.fiet.org/flashes.nsf/) Unions in fifty countries from all the continents from Argentine to Australia, are combining their efforts on the day in an international cyber campaign to talk to call centre workers and to help give them a voice to share experiences and air their grievances. On this occasion and at the request of OnLine subscribers we repeat our feat ure on the subject.
Feature
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.
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 poor est 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.
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.
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.
The sometimes deplorable working conditions in the call centres should also encourage employees to turn to the unions. The first signs of occupation al 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).