In any sector (distribution, banks, insurance, catering etc..) companies are asking workers to be available to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, every day of the year, hassling us for their economic interests. To make profits, companies need to improve the productivity of workers, to extend working time, to optimise the use of machines, to reduce as much as possible the time it takes to make the product market-ready, to strengthen market shares and to keep customers. The result of all of this is in the companies' interest which means that our lives get worse and worse.
In some call centres, workers usually answer customers' calls, and it is likely that the customer is also a worker who has found a spare minute to get through for some information or a service. And it's not unlikely that both call centre worker and the customer stress each other out. But also if sometimes, the call centre worker become the expiation of other workers stressed by their job, the work condition become more similar every where. To work overtime, to work on Saturday and Sunday, or during a night shift are conditions that involve all workers, and this is changing our social life, our relationships and our free time. We barely have the time to consume commodities at any time of the day - this is the only kind of freedom left us: answering calls, satisfying customers' needs, sorting out correspondence.
The introduction of computers, fax machines, and other office facilities has revolutionised the organisation of work inside offices and changed our jobs. In the same way the result of the introduction of call centres has meant a worsening of working conditions. Methods to intensify and to control our job are studied in call centres as well as in other sectors. For example at TIM, (Telefonica Italia Mobile) the company use the answer "satisfied ratio", that fixes a minimum of calls that must be answered in a certain area.
These aim of these kind of standards are the speeding up of our job. Every worker in a call centre is told to be quick and exact in answering customer calls, and the organisation of work is structured in order to match the flexibility of calls. This is why in many call centres compulsory overtime exists, and when the activity of the company slows down many workers are laid off.
Moreover companies use any trick to make workers accept the intensification of work: different contracts (temp. agency workers, temporary companies workers, Formazione Lavoro etc...), different wages for skilled and unskilled, or simply to encourage people to work harder in order to get a regular contract or to climb the ladder.
Some of us use different tricks to get some rest form the stressful working day: taking longer breaks, fooling about, dragging the job out, taking a day off pretending to be ill just on Saturday or Sunday. But these kind of tricks make it just about possible to bear the shitty job, but they do not change our conditions. We can only really change the situation with collective action, attacking the organisation of work in its weakest parts, finding out how our actions can be most effective against the strategies of the company. As workers we suffer the same conditions in this sector as well as in other sectors, in this country as well as in others. This aim of this leaflet, produced and handed out in different call centres and work places in Europe, is to point out this fact and to start an activity on a European scale.