Lenny talks about call centres and the struggle to unionise them:
I spent about six years working in call centres, and I just say a bit about what it is like, for those of you who have avoided it. All of the call centres I worked in employed people on a casual, part-time and temporary basis. All of them had their share of bullying, vindictive and harrassing supervisors. Supervisors were empowered to sack one at a moment’s notice, and didn’t require a particularly good excuse. Actually, they could just stop booking you for shifts if they didn’t like you for some reason. Pay was always low, about as close to minimum wage as they could get away with. Lunch or dinner breaks were usually unpaid. Toilet breaks are timed, and more than five minutes away from one’s computer might be penalised. And it’s miserable. Most call centres are situated in relatively inexpensive office space out in the sticks – bleak looking industrial wastelands with few amenities nearby.
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It isn’t easy to unionise call centres. To get recognition, you need a vote of all employees. But there’s a high turnover of staff, and a large number of people who remain formally on the books long after they have ceased to work shifts. On top of that, staff are disproportionately young, and are perhaps not as assertive as they need to be. And most people have other things they’re moving on to – they don’t see it as a permanent job, and thus may be reluctant to get involved in lengthy battles with management, especially if it’s so easy to fire them.
It struck me recently that, unlike what we were promised with the micro computer (remember them?) and internet revolutions, the IT business has managed to replicate almost exactly the old industrial divide of proletariat and labour aristocracy. You have an elite of programmers and consultants and other IT specialists who, the occasional outsourcing worry notwithstanding, have pretty good jobs, who are encouraged to believe this is all due to their own innate talents and who have little need for unions because those innate talents are supposed to be good enough to keep them employed. This IT aristocracy is fairly well paid and compensated in other ways, have a lot of freedom in their work and often treated as if they are the entire IT workforce, gratuitously sucked up to by politicians and “business leaders” as the “creative classes”.
At the other end of the scale you have the people Lenny describes above, whose work is just as demanding but who have much less freedom, are paid less and have to do all the scutwork: sys admins, helldeskers, call centre employees and so on. They work as temps, as casual labour, have little job security or recognition.
Of course, over time many of the workers in the aristocracy will find themselves to be actually in the other category as their jobs get otusourced or deskilled. For both groups, unionisation is the only real way to fight against this tendency, but both are notoriously hard to convince of it, if only because they’ve been indoctrinated with the idea that unions are for losers.