Call centre blues
My first job was at a call centre for a telephone company, back in the late 1990s. This company, recently privatised at the time, was undergoing the closure of its client-facing offices, transitioning all customer services to a single phone number. The publicly announced rationale was that, being a telephone company, it made sense to cater to all customer needs over the phone.
My job was gruelling, badly-paid, and precarious. We’d take hundreds of calls a day, with just a seven seconds’ gap between callers. We were granted just two fifteen-minute breaks and thirty minutes for lunch. We were supposed to record an average contact time of three minutes per call at the end of the shift. This was a perverse requirement almost no one met, and that our managers would use to threaten us with all sorts of punishments. We had few rights, and our contracts lasted a year only — after this time only a handful of us would be made permanent.1 Evidently, the managers exploited this, to…