amex/brighton.england

text in german
From the hotlines-leaflet from Brighton (March 2001):

There are lots of different departments at the Amex European headquarters, providing services either to the cardholders, or to the few businesses that accept Amex cards. As with most other calls centres, our breaks are monitored through the ACD, and the team manager will give us a hard time even if they are a few minutes over what they are supposed to be.

A few months back, Adecco took over the contract from Manpower. Manpower had been the main employment agency AMEX had used for years, and our conditions more or less stayed the same. Obviously still pretty crap compared to the permanent workers employed directly through Amex, but at least we were given a three month provisional contract and more or less the same amount of holidays as the permanent workers. When Adecco took over, a lot of people weren't even given contracts, which apart from everything else means that they don't even have to give us a week's notice, but can get rid of us pretty much immediately and without warning. They also cut down on our paid holidays by including public holidays in the annual holiday entitlement.

To prevent a big fuss about it, they did this clever thing where anybody already on a Manpower contract continued with more or less the same conditions. That meant that the permanent workers didn't really have any cause for complaint; the existing temps felt glad that they were safe, and only the new temps, who didn't know anybody else in here and had "accepted" the job with the conditions they were presented with, would be affected - in the short-term, that is. Of course, in the long-run it's going to affect everybody in here. With the rapid turn-over of staff, it won't take long before all the temps have the same shitty conditions as the new temps do now. And with a supply of cheap agency workers they can take on and get rid of whenever they want, Amex is going to think twice before offering people a permanent contract - which I guess is why over the years a great part of the permanent staff has been replaced with temps. But because most people just thought of their own immediate situation, nobody really did anything about it, and the take-over was as smooth as Amex and Adecco could have hoped for.

Apart from that, we're notoriously understaffed, which means that there is constant pressure on us to take on overtime. And the worst thing about it all is that things are getting so bloody expensive in Brighton. So as much as everybody would like to actually spend a little bit of time enjoying themselves, they are forced to sign up for it. But it's still not as bad as in many of the back offices where you are only allowed to do overtime if you sign up for these overtime schemes that go on for several months. So not only do they have to commit themselves to doing a certain amount of overtime every weekend for weeks, but they have also tied it in with a certain level of productivity, so that you don't get paid according to the amount of hours you work, but the amount of work you clear. So if any of the cases takes longer, you don't get paid for the extra time you spend on them. Pretty clever tactic, I guess, when everybody relies on doing a bit of overtime just to get by.


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