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The Migration of Struggle

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Language Put to Work

Part of the book series: Dynamics of Virtual Work ((DVW))

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Abstract

Tracking the flow of outsourced work across borders and into the growing basin of precarious, non-unionized, and low-wage employment, this chapter looks at how the cybertariat is confronting communicative capitalism’s formidable powers of mobility. The chapter’s analysis of the relationship between the globalization of customer relations and the transnationalization of worker resistance opens with an overview of the trends shaping the transnational portion of the call centre industry, or what I refer to as global call centre capital. The “Calling for Change” campaign launched in 2008 by the upstart New Zealand union Unite in cooperation with the Australian National Union of Workers is a particularly compelling example of how capital flight can generate collective organization and conflicts in its wake. Crossing the Tasman Sea to pursue call centres outsourced from Australia, the campaign utilized a medley of tactics including brand tarnishing, picketing, wildcat, and even hunger strikes. The organizing arising at the other end of the outsourcing from Australia is especially significant, I argue, as its protagonists come from sectors of New Zealand’s workforce that are well outside those traditionally represented by the country’s labour movement, including women, teenagers, migrant workers, and indigenous populations. As such, the case not only offers insights into the feminization and racialization of the cybertariat, but also into its potential to animate a labour transnationalism that can produce a counter-force to the mobility of global capital’s most communicative sectors.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Stories of outsourcing are omnipresent in discussions of call centre work. In one of the most poignant examples, staff from an Orange call centre in Britain were told in 2001 they could keep their jobs if they moved to the Philippines. The company, which cut 1200 jobs following its merger with T-Mobile to create Everything Everywhere, known as EE, told 40 night-shift workers at its Darlington call centre that they could take different and lower-paid jobs, or relocate 7000 miles to Manila. Staff claimed that the company gave them details of a “rice allowance” that they could claim as part of the transfer to IBM, Orange’s outsourcing partner in the Philippines (Neate, 2011).

  2. 2.

    As Huws (2014, p. 72) notes, “[t]hese standardization processes make it possible to use information and communication technologies more extensively, for instance by introducing standard reporting procedures that make it possible to compare performance over time or between different locations, by making it possible to pool knowledge in common databases or ‘knowledge banks,’ and by making it possible to overcome the limits of space and time.”

  3. 3.

    Some companies establish their call centre operations in other countries yet retain operating control over them (the term captive operation is sometimes used to describe this arrangement). Other companies simply outsource the operations entirely to another company in another country. In the latter case, this outsourcing has given rise to the transnational outsourced call centre industry, explored in this chapter.

  4. 4.

    While varied in terms of their focus, this set of perspectives could be described as deploying a post-colonial approach to the analysis of offshored call centre labour in India. In developing a perspective on call centre labour that is distinct from the debates of the late 1990s, these scholars have highlighted the profoundly ambivalent effects of offshored, affective labour on the new Indian workforce to whom it is shifted. Winifred Poster (2007) and Kiran Mirchandani (2012) have traced the way India’s colonial history has determined not only the path of this informational work transfer, but the Indian labour force’s subordinate role within the emergent transnational configuration of service work. Forced to serve American, British, or Canadian customers half a world away, Indian workers are subject to disrupted identities and circadian rhythms, routine racism, and intensely rationalized labour processes. Describing the Indian call centre workforce as “something of a white-collar proletariat,” Shehzad Nadeem (2011, p. 4) argues that globalization “does not entail the loosening of temporal chains, but their reconfiguration: a combination both rigid and flexible that binds even as it liberates” (p. 101). For reviews of this approach, see Brophy (2014, 2015).

  5. 5.

    The development of the global call centre industry is a classic example of the process Vincent Mosco (2009, p. 128) characterizes as spatialization, in which “communication technology overcome[s] the constraints of geographical space.”

  6. 6.

    Weiss (2007, p. 147) further illustrates the global parallels in labour processes and technologies: “Because there is a global dissemination of technology and software, Colombian call centres are organised according to the universal parameters found globally. In several companies we visited, the technology and software are purchased from transnational corporations like Avaya, and the databases and their maintenance are provided by Oracle or Microsoft.”

  7. 7.

    Some of these companies are themselves (as was the case with Aegis, before its 2014 sale to Teleperformance) components of larger, diversified conglomerates.

  8. 8.

    As Sandro Mezzadra (2010) and others (Lüthje et al., 2013) have observed, global flows of capital and labour increasingly challenge the analytical model of a “new international division of labour” (NIDL) theory developed during the 1970s, which centred around the construction of a model describing unidirectional flows of offshored labour from the “centre” to the “periphery” of capitalist globalization.

  9. 9.

    As such, the global nature of call centres illuminates what geographers Jaime Peck and Adam Tickell (2002, p. 386) propose is one of the signal features of neoliberalism, a “regime of highly competitive interlocal relations” in which most local social settlements become “tendentially subject in one way or another to the disciplinary force of neoliberalized social relations.”

  10. 10.

    For a critical treatment of these reports in the United States, see Mirchandani (2012) and Carrillo Rowe et al. (2013). It is important to note that many of the sectors (like call centres) where outsourcing is taking place are actually expanding (Huws, 2014, p. 44). Employment in the UK call centre industry, for example, grew at the same time as offshoring was picking up, and by 2013 jobs in US call centres were still being forecasted to expand, despite the offshoring phenomenon (Deloitte Consulting, 2013).

  11. 11.

    For a discussion of the potential for automation of call centre labour, see Chap. 7.

  12. 12.

    Underscoring the observations made by scholars of Indian call centre work, Huws suggests that as this process has advanced, “the idea of work as something unbounded and ‘virtual’ began to take root” (Huws, 2013, p. 4).

  13. 13.

    Shortly after the company’s arrival, the Wall Street Journal and Heritage Foundation Index, which ranks states according to their adherence to the market fundamentalist principles of Chicago School economics, announced that New Zealand was an impressive third in the world in economic “freedom,” pointing out that it took only 12 days on average to start up a business there (The Heritage Foundation, 2015).

  14. 14.

    In the only comparative academic study of the development of the call centre sector in New Brunswick and New Zealand that I am aware of, Wendy Larner outlines many of the similarities between these two cases and also the important differences. Above all, as Larner notes (2002, p. 142), “not only did New Zealand come relatively late to the idea of call centres as a development strategy, nearly a full decade after New Brunswick, also the strategy was enacted in a very different context.”

  15. 15.

    As a critical account of the campaign describes, “some of the organizers were anarchists, some were Leninists, some were social democrats, and many were non-aligned” (Toby, 2007, para. 7).

  16. 16.

    Matt McCarten captured the union’s attitude towards high-profile picketing when he noted that “you see a picket as an industrial spat, I see it as marketing opportunity” (personal communication, May 11, 2011).

  17. 17.

    Supersize My Pay was inaugurated with what the union believes was the world’s first Starbucks strike, an action which began as a small protest by workers from a downtown outlet and turned into a city-wide action when Starbucks workers heard that managers would be brought in to cover the shifts of the striking workers. Its mechanics are described in detail, from a critical perspective, in Toby (2007).

  18. 18.

    In addition to Synovate, these included TNS, SurveyTalk, UMR, Phoenix, MarketPulse, OCIS, Colmar Brunton, DigiPoll, and Reid Research.

  19. 19.

    Such contracts are more commonly known as “on-call” or “zero-hours” contracts.

  20. 20.

    Vincent Mosco and David Lavin (2008, p. 150) have described the four types of international labour organization that have arisen to address capital’s mobility and transnational scope, including international federations, global federations of unions, government or public federations, and “worker associations that may be rooted in one nation but are testing new forms of organizing and are partnering with unions and federations outside the nation.”

  21. 21.

    Given the rapidity of turnover in the industries they have organized and therefore in their membership base, it is quite possible, as several organizers have pointed out, that the union has actually signed up two or three times as many members since 2005.

  22. 22.

    Occasionally, when customers on the other end of the phone were Pacific Islanders with little English, the call was transferred to Arnold or Ross so they could conduct the interaction.

  23. 23.

    Omar Hamed recalled that during the Calling for Change campaign an Irish woman joined as a delegate for one of the companies and “organized the whole site basically.” This case is notable because the woman had been in the political strikes in Ireland during the Troubles and according to Hamed “had this radical tradition of unionism,” thus offering another example of the migration of struggle (personal communication, May 6, 2011).

  24. 24.

    The Fight for 15 is a movement of North American service workers in childcare, home and health care, airport, gas station and, most visibly, fast-food workers, which has been striking for increased pay and union recognition in the workplace.

  25. 25.

    McCarten placed turnover in the union at 66% a year, and believed 90% of members are part time or casual (personal communication, May 11, 2011). Joe Carolan offered a sense of how challenging it is to maintain a strong presence in the service industry, noting that in sectors like fast food “the churn is relentless,” and “if we stop still for a couple of months, all our members would be gone” (personal communication, May 6, 2011).

  26. 26.

    As John Minto suggested, some of the pay gains barely meet inflation: “Well, the union contracts we have are relatively good. We’ve been able to, with the call centers we’ve been involved in for a while, over time you can build improvements into the contract. But the contracts are still quite modest in terms of what contracts would’ve been like 20years ago. But we’ve been able to make some significant gains. You know, one of our call centers we’ve got workers being paid a $20 meal allowance after 7 o’clock, so those sorts of things, (kind of in a way) we’re trying to push that hard through other agencies, through other call centers, but we’re not sure … we’re still … those things would’ve been, 20 years ago, quite common, they’re not common now. Look, it’s minimum pay, minimum conditions, so generally we’re able to push for … we’re able to get some small improvements each year, aside from giving some sort of inflation-based pay increase” (personal communication, May 11, 2011).

  27. 27.

    One critique of the Supersize campaign suggested Unite is only “partially a new organizational form” from the established unions it critiques. Where the union is innovative, this anarchist critique maintains, is in its “attempt to update old-school bureaucratic unionism for today’s fragmented workplace” (Toby, 2007, para. 34).

  28. 28.

    Some features of Unite’s rapid growth are no doubt especially connected to the context of the union’s emergence, including the economic climate at the time. As Mike Treen suggested, with strong economic growth, low unemployment, and entire sectors of the service industry run on minimum wage, it was an ideal moment to organize workers in these industries, who could move from job to job with less worry about engaging in union activity (personal communication, May 10, 2011).

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  1. School of Communication, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada

    Enda Brophy

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Brophy, E. (2017). The Migration of Struggle. In: Language Put to Work. Dynamics of Virtual Work. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95244-1_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95244-1_5

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