Call Center: a new class of exploited, prepared to rise!

text in deutsch

(31.10.01; From: Bip Bip, countrywide union newsletter of the FLMUniti-CUB collectives at Telecom, Tim, etc., No. 48, July-August 2001; email: flmufi@dada.it)

The strong growth in the call centre sectors in the last few years is without doubt a new and important factor. It is an "asset" that in a significant way determines the strategy of some big enterprises and makes a clear increase in profit possible.
But the question that we must find an answer to is, whether this came along with a change in the production process and whether the corresponding work relationships in the sector have changed, compared with what we have seen before.
In the year 2000 there were 73,000 employees with an expected increase of 34 percent for the same year. The number of call centres was up to 1,080, the estimation for 2001 was 1,280. 1994 there were just 39, so it is easy to calculate the growth rate.
The call centre industry includes more and more productive areas, because a growing number of companies concentrate on the communication and the commercialisation of products and services, to get ahead in competition. We see an increase in the numbers employed in call centres in the communication sector, public administration, finance and insurance sectors and also in sales and industry sectors.
As always, Capitalism needs to restructure in order to progress. The New Economy is actually a result of this process of the last few years, and call centres are therefore one of the most strategically important sectors. In an economic system that is based on the mechanism of the exploitation of the workforce, new technologies become above all an instrument for increasing productivity and for the growth of profit through the intensification of the exploitation of the workers.
It is important to establish, that there is a constant growth in the number of firms that outsource workers and use firms that concentrate on services. Of the 73,000 agents 22,000 work in companies, in which the call centre services have been outsourced. But not all regions have the same share: half in the north, half in the centre and south. After Lombardia and Lazio, the regions with most workers are Campania and Sicily, with a larger density as in "rich" regions in the centre and the north, also thanks to regional promotion by the state.
It is obvious that these developments make possible the exponential increase of the in the number of precarious jobs in the job market, with the support of the common policies of the leaders of trade unions. Precarious work and other factors cause the work in call centres to be anything but enviable. The insecurity in the workplaces forces the workers to yield to the pressure of the bosses and put up with a clear deterioration of work conditions. The agents often earn just 10,000 lire an hour [£3.30] or 800,000 lire [£265] a month. Above all in the South this allows all the bosses to make an enormous profits.
Particularly the uninterrupted use of headsets and the effect of the computerised work made the work unbearable. It is practically impossible to do more than four or five hours a day of this kind of work. Often the workers sit in a small room together, in offices full of computers, telephones, headsets and chairs there is often 10 or 15 workers in one square meter or less. They have to do the same thing over and over again many times a day.
Often the professional challenges are extremely small and in general professional development is non-existent. The work is becoming more and more standardised and the companies are prone to, for inbound calls, "sort" the calls before the agent answers and lead them down pre-determined channels. It is usual for the turnover to be over 30 percent in a year. Amongst other things the technology makes possible the immediate control of the work performance, the listening-in to the calls and the later control using the information about the duration of the call, the date, time and quantity of calls and other data. Based on this we ask ourselves, where the difference is between this mode of production and the one we know from the beginning of the last century, ordinarily know as "Taylorist-Fordist" method.
In this sector the average age is much lower. The personnel are as a rule 23 or 24 years old, and often students, having to make up the costs of the study by working. There are also often young people that have just finished college, don't have a very full CV and are looking for work experience.
As typical in classic capitalism ­ and here the "New Economy" is no exception ­ there are processes, that maintain the economic system and in their turn create contradictions, that lead to a new instability. The instability of the industrial ecosystem is due to the development of a young working class, that feels on their shoulders the injustice of an oligarchic economy, that only aims for the accumulation of pure surplus value, to say with Marx. In the USA, where the development of this sector first started, we can already see a clear increase of trade union organising of these young workers and the beginning of forms of mobilisation.
This picture we will soon find in Italy, too, a new "workers'" movement, without bad experiences in tow, which can begin a discussion again - that has often been had in the last decade ­ about the necessity of transforming of the society and the search for a progressive alternative to the capitalist system.
Nothing new under the sun! The philosopher from Trier talks in "Grundrisse" about the "dure repliche della storia" [duro: tough, difficult; replica: repetition, contradiction, della storia: of history / now start the jigsaw puzzle or check out 959 pages of "Grundrisse" in order to find the quote!] that proved itself to be right, also in the wider historical perspective!
Quadrongolo


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