Abstract
This chapter explores the formation of the call centre workforce, its entry into the workplaces of communicative capitalism, and its encounter with the established yet struggling trade union movement. The twin backdrops for this account of how language was put to work in call centres during the 1990s and 2000s are Atlantic Canada and Ireland, regions divided by an ocean but united in their status as signature cases of state-sponsored informational development. In both regions a highly educated, multilingual workforce was introduced to working with a headset in the call centres that proliferated through newly wired urban centres. By zeroing in on the case of Aliant call centre workers in the province of New Brunswick, the chapter relates how the lively intelligences and communicative capacities of this new workforce were compressed and reformatted into what I call abstract communication. Harry Braverman’s vision of the degradation of mental labour became the lived experience of employees in the customer relations departments of the Atlantic Canadian wireless sector, where management’s subjection of workers to routinization, increasingly intrusive forms of monitoring, and threats of labour outsourcing eventually produced outbreaks of workplace unrest and labour organizing through incumbent trade unions. However, the cases in this chapter are not auspicious ones for the collective organization of the cybertariat, illustrating how even in-house, unionized call centre workers remain vulnerable to regional and global outsourcing strategies of their employers. This weakness appears to derive at least in part from the defensive organizing postures adopted by the trade unions representing these workers, raising the question of whether the established union movement in its present form is an adequate vehicle for the collective organization of the cybertariat.
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Notes
- 1.
The research in the portion of this chapter that discusses Atlantic Canada draws on 14 interviews conducted with Aliant call centre workers and CEP members in Moncton. These workers had all been present at the telecommunications company when it was NBTel and had experienced the merger that would turn it into Aliant, unionization through the CEP, the ongoing restructuring at the company subsequent to the merger, and the 2004 strike. In 2013, the CEP merged with the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) union to form Unifor.
- 2.
In Ireland, I conducted 13 interviews with call centre workers, trade unionists, and labour activists in the sector.
- 3.
The companies involved in the merger were NBTel (New Brunswick), Island Telecom Inc. (Prince Edward Island), Maritime Telegraph and Telephone Company (Nova Scotia), and NewTel Enterprises Limited (Newfoundland and Labrador). In early 2000, Bell Canada Enterprises increased its controlling interest in the new firm to 42% (Rideout, 2003, p. 119), and by 2004 its stake had risen to 53% (Wong, 2004).
- 4.
Joan McFarland (2000, p. 8) suggests the original impetus for the call centre development strategy can be traced to a single government employee who had been hired away from NBTel.
- 5.
Richardson, Belt, and Marshall (2000) have argued that call centres are often deliberately located in areas with a large surplus supply of wage labour. As McKenna promoted his political economic strategy for the province, a full 12% of the active labour force (roughly 40,000 people) was officially unemployed, a figure that did not even include part-time or casual workers seeking full-time work (Good & McFarland, 2005, p. 99). Julie Guard (2003) found that while pay varies according to the type of call centre and whether or not the call centre is unionized, the lowest annual average salary for customer service representatives in Canada was in the Atlantic provinces, at CDN$23,370.
- 6.
The high level of education among call centre workforces is a feature we will encounter repeatedly during the course of this book. It was recently confirmed in the UK setting, where one in three call centre workers in the UK now has a degree, according to a 2010 survey by recruitment firm Hays in conjunction with Top 50 Call Centres for Customer Service (as cited in Snowdon, 2010).
- 7.
These figures were higher than the Canadian average at the time. A 2004 report by the Canadian Customer Contact Centre Industry (CCCI) noted that nearly half of customer service representatives in Canadian inbound call centres, and just over one in four workers in outbound call centres, had achieved a post-secondary diploma or degree (as cited in Schatz & Johnson, 2007). As a whole, the education levels of workers employed in call centres is therefore notable, especially when one considers the fact that many of those employed in these workspaces may not have a degree yet but are still students enrolled in university and therefore on the way to obtaining one. Ursula Huws (2014, p. 41) situates the development of this mass intellectuality within a broader, global project to serve the needs of employers: “There is convincing evidence that we have now entered a phase in global capitalism in which, just like the need for universal literacy in the nineteenth century, there is now a universal need for new generic attitudes and abilities. And, just as in the 19th century, state agencies have leaped to the assistance of employers to provide them. Only this time it isn’t within national borders, or competing empires, but on a global scale.”
- 8.
Ireland’s wooing of foreign multinationals in the emergent informational sector has a longer history that cannot be addressed here. Suffice it to note that, by 1985, IBM, Lotus, and Microsoft had established development centres for software and data processing in the country (Burnham, 2003, p. 541), which was also a destination for electronics manufacturing (see Lüthje, Hürtgen, Pawliki, & Sproll, 2013).
- 9.
Heller continues, speaking of the Canadian context: “What we are seeing then, in francophone Canada, is a shift from understanding language as being primarily a marker of ethnonational identity, to understanding language as being a marketable commodity on its own, distinct from identity” (2003, p. 474).
- 10.
As Breathnach notes (2000, p. 481), three-quarters of call centre companies reported the availability of language skills as either the first or second most important reason for relocating.
- 11.
An Italian worker employed in a bank’s Dublin call centre described it to me this way: “In the call centre, there are, let me just think … There are Italians, the Italian department, Italian marketing, the Greek department, the French department, and I missing one … another department, so four different markets” (Irish worker 1, personal communication, July 24, 2009).
- 12.
The CEP’s “communication” portion was born in the early 1970s when the Canadian contingent of the Communications Workers of America opted for secession from its US-based parent (McKercher, 2002).
- 13.
Why these workers were not unionized previous to the Aliant merger is unclear. The CEP had tried to unionize them at least twice previously in the 1990s, without success. As one worker describes it: “We were presented with it, and we were asked to join the union throughout my career at least twice before we actually did. […] And we voted on it, and voted against it because whatever [the other unionized clerical/call centre workers in other provinces] had, we also got. Without paying the union dues or anything like that. I mean in terms of money and hours of work […]. As far as protection and stuff like that, we didn’t have what they had, but we didn’t feel the need to have it, at that point in time” (Aliant worker 1, personal communication, April 6, 2006). Workers I interviewed often cited a lack of trust towards trade unions or a relatively good relationship with management as reasons for the lack of unionization. Whether the suspiciousness of unions arose from personal experience or not, it was often related alongside descriptions of trade unions as overly bureaucratic or as inclined to focus on the pettier aspects of the labour-management relationship. Others pointed to what they suggested was New Brunswick’s lack of an established labour history, or to the strong work ethic of its inhabitants. One worker’s comments are typical: “[Our tradition of trade unionism] is lacking compared to the other provinces. Especially in Moncton, because it’s more of a service city, not an industry [city]. If you go up north, where the economy runs on paper mills and other wood products, they’re all unionized right, so union[s] [are] a lot stronger in the northern economy” (Aliant worker 2, personal communication, April 6, 2006).
- 14.
See also Pia Bramming, Ole Sørensen, and Peter Hasle (2009), and Pupo and Noack (2009). For a summary of labour process analysis of the taylorization of call centre work, see Chap. 2. As Huws (2009) suggests, “numerous case studies have documented the colonization of other professions by this mass-production model of organizing communicative work, as the labour process of health care, civil service, bank and other workers becomes subject to ‘callcentreification.’”
- 15.
The concept of abstract communication is indebted to the work of Gigi Roggero (2011, p. 95), who, in his discussion of the university’s transformation within post-Fordism, develops the concept to describe how “[l]iving knowledge is reduced to abstract knowledge, so as to be captured and valorized. Paraphrasing Marx, we could say that abstract knowledge corresponds to the indifference toward every specific form of labor: it is knowledge in general, knowledge sans phrase.”
- 16.
The Regulation School economist Michel Aglietta defines abstract labour as “a social relation that transforms the products of labour into equivalent categories, known as commodities, in a homogeneous space in which a measure known as value can be applied” (1979, p. 39).
- 17.
As the research of Taylor and Bain (2001) and Callaghan and Thompson (2001) has shown, recognizing that there is some diversity within call centre, labour processes “should not lead to the conclusion that call centres are equally distributed between ‘quality’ and ‘quantity’ operations” (Taylor & Bain, 2003, p. 1492). Quantification and measure have been at the heart of managerial strategy in call centre settings precisely because “[t]he capitalist economy involves the victory of quantity over quality; all qualitatively different things must be reduced to quantitative units of the same thing (measured in money)” (McNally, 2011, p. 71). This does not mean that quality, or affective connection, is unimportant in call centre communication, however, as we shall see below.
- 18.
Vincent Mosco observes the power of the commodification process to transform communication: “commodification processes at work in the society as a whole penetrate communication processes and institutions, so improvements and contradictions in the societal commodification process influence communication as a social practice” (2009, p. 130). In this sense, the production of abstract communication in call centres occurs when communication begins to take on the features of commercial exchange. As described by David Graeber (2011, p. 103): “What marks commercial exchange is that it’s impersonal: who it is that is selling something to us, or buying something from us, should in principle be entirely irrelevant.”
- 19.
Marcela Miozzo and Matías Ramírez (2003, p. 65) note the expanding need for customer service work in their discussion of the United Kingdom telecommunications sector: “by diversifying the range of services that they are able to provide with new technologies, firms have increased ‘front-end’ employment to meet data traffic in areas such as sales, solutions, helpdesk, product development, design, media and marketing.”
- 20.
Research suggested a strikingly similar composition of the call centre labour force in Ireland as far as its high levels of education were concerned. Consider the description offered of his colleagues by an Italian call centre worker interviewed in Dublin: “For example, they are from different backgrounds. People, which have degrees, have different, really different degrees: law, political science, or whatever, philosophy, different people” (Irish worker 1, personal communication, July 24, 2009).
- 21.
This appropriation of labour’s communicative capacities in call centres is a feature that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2009, p. 267) see operating across the broader economy, where “knowledge that is widespread across society—mass intellectuality—is becoming a central productive force.” Christian Fuchs echoes this position when he suggests that “the production process of knowledge is a social, common process, but knowledge is appropriated by capital” (2010, p. 187).
- 22.
The original post, in English, includes spelling and grammatical mistakes throughout, and most of those have been removed here. These errors may be due to the fact that the worker is francophone, or (given the risks involved in denouncing labour conditions at their company) that they did not wish to be identified through their writing.
- 23.
This reduction of communication to a process that can be measured in quantitative terms would hardly have come as a surprise to Harry Braverman, who argued in the early 1970s that “[a]s flows subject to mathematical rules, clerical processes can be checked at various points by mathematical controls” (1974, p. 217).
- 24.
For example, Mirchandani (2012, p. 57) describes the way in which genuine contact between American customers and Indian call centre workers is thwarted because the latter, forced through extensive language training to present (or abstract) themselves as fictional Americans, must engage in “locational masking”, and therefore sidestep ice-breaking questions from customers on the conflict over Kashmir, or how the weather is in Bangalore.
- 25.
In their study of subject formation among the Indian call centre workforce, Carrillo-Rowe et al. (2013, p. 178) also find this process at work when they note that the enforced projection of fictional American identities “isolates and insulates the agents’ bodily and affective inhabitance from their immediate surroundings.”
- 26.
As media scholar Nicholas Garnham has observed (adopting the perspective of management), “white-collar labour time is inherently difficult to assess and to price” (2011, p. 56). In the analysis of the production of value in call centres we are reminded of Gigi Roggero’s point that the need to reduce “living knowledge to abstract knowledge, or the possibility of measuring it, forces capital to impose completely artificial units of time” (2011, p. 25).
- 27.
In Ireland, I interviewed several workers who had brought in the Communications Workers’ Union to their in-house call centre (for a transnational wireless company) who described how they had managed to push back against management in the process: “Well, they definitely know there is a union there now. … For a long time they kept it under wraps, because people were joining every other day and we kept it all quiet. And it worked well that way. And then things started to happen and we were caught in union hands, if you like, and quoting our rights when things weren’t going our way or when things were bad. We were quoting what our rights were. And we were told in no uncertain terms that ‘there was no union in the house and that we couldn’t have one.’ And we told them ‘yes we can. It is our statutory right to be a union member if we want to be.’ And they said ‘no, no, no, no, there is no union here.’ And eventually we told them one day ‘yes there is and there is a lot of members.’ They kind of backed off a bit that way, because they knew then that we were seeking advice. It happened. We were restructuring and they were being bought over. There were a lot of things happening that were nasty at that time. … They know kind of the union there now and actually we have had open union meetings and they send their little spies to the meetings, quite obvious. … We knew who they were. We knew who our members were and who the little spies that were appearing who they were. They know that there is a union there now. It was very hard with the technical department that was being broken up.” (Irish worker 2, personal communication, August 5, 2009).
- 28.
At the end of July national treasurer Andre Foucault stated that the CEP had spent roughly CDN$3 million on the local union’s strike fund (Bradbury Bennett, 2004a).
- 29.
The collective agreement was extended in 2007 amid the general uncertainty of the drawn-out ownership bid (the largest takeover bid in Canadian history) for Aliant’s parent company BCE on the part of a consortium of investors led by the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan. The bid fell through in late 2008.
- 30.
I refer to this process as the real subsumption of immaterial labour in Chap. 7. Speaking of customer service work at British Telecom, Miozzo and Ramírez describe a similar process of abstraction: “It is apparent that [British Telecom] has designed and customised ICT, on the one hand, to exploit the complementary features associated with achieving higher productivity and better customer service (quicker response times, etc.) but, on the other hand, to drive down skill levels of operators and enforce economies of time and control, which allow the efficient provision of a high volume of standardised low cost services” (2003, p. 70).
Interviews Cited
Aliant worker 1, Moncton, April 6th, 2006.
Aliant worker 2. Moncton, April 6th, 2006.
Aliant worker 3. Moncton, April 3rd, 2006.
Aliant worker 6. Moncton, April 6th, 2006.
Brideau, Sandy. Moncton. April 6th, 2006.
Buckley, Karen. Moncton, April 6th, 2006.
Irish worker 1. Dublin, July 24th, 2009.
Irish worker 2. Dublin, August 5th, 2009.
Leblanc, Ferdinand. Moncton, April 3rd, 2006.
Malone, Mark. Dublin, July 21st, 2009.
Richard, Donovan. Moncton, April 4th, 2006.
Richard, Keenan. Moncton, April, 4th, 2006.
Roy, Philippe. Moncton, April 5th, 2006.
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Brophy, E. (2017). The Making of the Call Centre Cybertariat. In: Language Put to Work. Dynamics of Virtual Work. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95244-1_4
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