WORKING

OF AND
RELATING TO
LABOR




Devious

as told to Doug Collins
The Free Press

illustration by d'Artagnan Moore

Here's a story from a customer service worker who proves that the pitfalls of phone work go way beyond sore ears. Some details have been changed to protect the sneaky.


I answer customer calls from all around the country. The company I work for is taking over new markets and no one in the office really knows how things are supposed to be done because things change so fast. You ask one authority figure, and they'll tell you one thing, and you ask another, and they'll tell you a different thing. More likely than not, the standard operating procedure as understood by we who actually do the work differs from either.

I started work here about eight months ago, and since then they've hired 30 or 40 new people into my same sort of job, and a lot of that is just turnover. I got the job through a finder agency and I paid over $2000 to get the job, which I'm still paying off. When I got the job, I had to sign a paper saying something like, "This is not a contract. You are hired at will. We can get rid of you for any reason." It is clear that I have no job security.

My supervisor sits in an office and as far as I can tell, doesn't do anything. My immediate authority figure is the "team lead", who gets paid only slightly more than I do. Basically all the personnel management is farmed out to the team leads.

They have an extensive way of keeping track of how employees are doing. When I started working there, there wasn't any call monitoring. Now they have a system, supposedly to ensure "quality," where they press a button and record your phone conversations and listen to them later. I used to work the night shift, and since no leads or supervisors are around to record at night, sometimes I could just blow off rude or annoying customers even though I maybe could have helped. I don't think I was ever really rude to customers, but I certainly had less tolerance for bullshit at night.

Another way you are judged is by your calls-per-hour. The more calls you handle, the better. There's a lot of ways to keep calls short. One is just to transfer the caller to another employee as quickly as possible. You can also manipulate the control buttons on the phones to inflate your score, or take a longer break without hurting your score. Everyone's call monitoring and calls-per-hour scores are publicized to the entire department every month, I guess to encourage competition rather than solidarity between us.

The rhetoric about the monitoring is that management wants to make sure that everything is standardized, and they want to make sure that we're giving the right information out to customers. I think the truth is they just don't trust us, and they probably have good reason not to, because there's a lot of resentment and animosity toward the management.

There's also all this talk about empowerment. The only power we really have is to give a $25 credit on a customer's account to keep them happy. The truth is that in any decision with any meaning we have absolutely no power. And when the people at higher levels do make a new policy, they'll announce it to us the day before it goes into effect, which of course makes it extremely difficult to do our job.

Every quarter there's a customer service pep rally where they trot out a company exec to talk about how great the company's doing. I'm sure I'm not the only one who just sits there and wishes I had the guts to raise my hand and say, "Excuse me, if you're taking in millions of dollars, why are we getting paid so poorly?" Management always says customer service is the backbone of the company and it's true that without us they'd be lost, but management doesn't translate that into pay raises.

I've managed to mask bad my attitude, but the vast majority of workers who have been there more than three months are extremely jaded and I guess pretty much just as devious as I am in trying to work the system.







Working Around

KOREA. An employee was fired from a Hyundai plant in February for conducting a sit-in to protest excessive workload. The employee later committed suicide by setting himself on fire by the entrance of the Hyundai plant. The incident led to work stoppages throughout mid May.

Hyundai retaliated by shutting down the plant indefinitely. At a rally of 5000 strikers, police arrested some 300 for what they termed an illegal strike. On June 3, over 10,000 students and labor leaders demonstrated in Seoul for the release of detained labor leaders. On June 6, police stormed a Buddhist temple and a Catholic cathedral and arrested 13 telecommunication union activists who had been holding hunger strikes in the buildings. (Multinational Monitor)



MEXICO. The U.S. company Kirkwood Industries has a Mexican affiliate which has fired as much as three-fifths of 240 workers at its electrical components plant since March 1995. The fired workers, some of whom had been at the plant for ten years, were attempting to form an independent labor union. The government in Mexico has tight control of large unions in the country.

Meanwhile, the devaluation of the peso has turned NAFTA into a disaster for workers on both sides of the Rio Grande. The devaluation means Mexican workers are less able to buy US products, which may cost the US up to 350,000 jobs, according to Senate Budget Committee testimony.

The only group likely to benefit now are exporters from Mexico. A weak peso and declining Mexican wages mean cheap labor. Nike shoe company announced within days of the peso's fall that it would open assembly plants in Mexico. (Multinational Monitor)



CALIFORNIA. The Steel Industries Group of Nevada is planning to start a steel manufacturing business with labor from the Susanville prison. The company sent a letter to a business rival, inviting the rival to invest in the project or face ruination. Prison labor, legalized by initiative in 1990 in California, would be paid $5.25 per hour compared to current industry rates of $18 per hour. (Northwest Labor Press)



TOPPENISH, WASHINGTON. The United Food and Commercial Workers won a large organizing victory at the Washington Beef Company in the Yakima valley. Workers, mainly Latinos, voted 253 to 118 to be represented by Local 1439. Workers had been complaining of paltry medical benefits and working on a speeded-up line with no pay increase. (Outlook)



WASHINGTON- The unprecedented first win for a farmworkers' union in Washington state has resulted in current efforts to negotiate a contract. Negotiators have made progress, with vintner Chateau Ste. Michelle agreeing to give formworkers 11 paid holidays a year (including Cesar Chavez' birthday), as well as a comprehensive medical and dental plan. The company has also agreed not to unleash a campaign to decertify the union during the life of the contract. Some items remain to be negotiated, including strong protections against poisoning of workers by pesticides, but the local United Farmworkers' chapter hopes to have negotiations wrapped up in time for a victory celebration in mid-October.

Have a Labor-related story to tell? Good news or bad.. send it to Doug Collins WAfreepress@gmail.com and he'll tell the world.

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Contents on this page were published in the October/November, 1995 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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