-----Original Message----- From: Sid Shniad [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: December 7, 2000 2:13 PM Subject: BUSY SIGNAL - The Vancouver Courier The Vancouver Courier Sunday, December 3, 2000 BUSY SIGNAL Call centres are the sweat shops of the information age, where frazzled employees are paid rock-bottom wages for high-stress work. by Kevin Kinghorn, staff writer The cherry of an Export A cigarette flares and crackles softly as Terry Johnson takes one last haul before heading into the ground floor of a Cambie Street office building. It's a crisp and sunny autumn afternoon, but Johnson will spend the next six hours on the telephone in a tiny cubicle in a bunker-like room, far from the sun's rays. Packed with 30 other operators in an office the size of most living rooms, Johnson will call up to 1,000 strangers, most of whom openly disdain him. "Any time I'm not talking to somebody is wasted time to the company," said Johnson, who's in his late 30s and looks like a high- school math teacher with his tinted glasses and shock of grey-brown hair coiffed a la mad professor. "I'm expected to be dialing or interviewing the whole time. I've talked till I've lost my voice." Supervisors monitor his calls through a computer terminal linked to his phone. If the number of people he convinces to participate in his survey drops below a predetermined average per hour, that shortcoming will be pointed put to him by the on-duty manager. Low production is grounds for dismissal. After five days of exhausting phone work, Johnson will take home less money than most teenaged busboys. Johnson is a call centre agent at a market research firm, a person widely despised by almost everyone who's ever been phoned at home and asked their opinion on a company's latest ad campaign or governmental policy. His working conditions bear a striking resemblance to industrial-era assembly lines. Like those early 20th century factories, the sweatshops of the information age have inspired a push to unionize. Call centres are a $15-billion industry in Canada and provide approximately 30,000 jobs in Vancouver alone. The city's time zone makes it ideal for this type of work. Survey and marketing companies can employ shifts of workers throughout the day -an early shift for prime eastern hours and later shifts for the West Coast. And because of a large multicultural population, the supply of workers who can communicate in several languages is almost endless. As many as 100 large call centres in Vancouver employ 100 to 500 agents each, while the number of small call centres approaches 1,000, according to the BCIT Call Centre of Excellence training facility. While many employees are in technical support or customer service positions that pay $15 to $22 per hour, the industry has an ugly underbelly: outbound call centres like Johnson's that do telemarketing or public opinion polls for large corporations or political parties. These firms use phones linked to computer terminals to pressure cheap labour into working beyond what critics see as reasonable limits. Derek Thompson, a consultant at the unionized market research company Campbell Goodell Traynor, calls it the "warm bodies on seats" approach. "These guys don't care who sits in the chair as long as they can make the calls," said Thompson. "They have no vested interest in taking care of their employees. It's a huge problem in the industry right now." Ironically, Thompson says companies that constantly turn over burned-out staff spend more money on training and hiring than it would cost to scale back production and pay workers a decent wage. Raymond Chretien is a 25-year-old Telus employee with a neatly trimmed goatee and impeccably styled brown hair. With his exemplary posture and polite, controlled tone, he looks every bit the model hotel employee he was before landing a job in a Burnaby Telus call centre. He's also an organizer for the Vancouver-based Telecommuni- cations Workers Union on an indeterminate leave of absence to bolster union membership in call centres. Although 25 per cent of the TWU's 10,000 B.C. members work for call centres, most are technical support operators, not telemarketers. Chretien says telemarketing and survey companies are popping up in Vancouver because of an abundance of cheap, desperate labour thanks to a weak B.C. economy. "I can't give you specifics because new shops open overnight. They're fly-by-nighters and are gone again in a month, but these operations are definitely growing," said Chretien. "They always need fresh blood. As fast as bodies are coming in the door, people are leaving because they can't stand the pressure and constant monitoring. "It's basically a race to see who can screw people the fastest - it's a race to the bottom, who can pay the least and who can treat people the worst." Chretien freely admits unions won't make the job a "cakewalk," but thinks they give operators security and an avenue of recourse when problems develop. So far, however, organizing employees has been a tough slog because of high turnover. Hired this summer, Terry Johnson is one of a handful of "long-time" employees - most quit after the first paycheck because the stress is too much to handle. "It's very difficult to call people in their homes," said Johnson. "People get very mad at you. And if something upsetting happens, you can't get up and take a minute to walk around and catch your breath - you're forced to take the next call. You're made to feel like a machine." Of the eight people he was hired with, three lasted the month. He estimates only 10 per cent of his co-workers stay longer than a year. "It's funny because if you go into the lunch room there nobody will talk," said Johnson. "You just get so burned out from talking on the phone so much that you don't want to speak anymore." Johnson tells of a co-worker who goes drinking with his friends to relieve the stress built up by a day in the phone room, but can't do anything but sit and listen because he's so tired of talking. The problem isn't just psychological. Johnson estimates, at least one-third of the workers in his call centre have lost their voices from overwork. He calls it "call centre throat." Johnson, who took the job when his fledgling writing career failed to cover the bills, is helping organize the union at his office because he says the ownership is abusing a class of workers that can least afford it. "A lot of my co-workers are in their 30s and 40s and have families. They're usually immigrants or they've just lost another job and it's the only thing they could find right sway. One guy was laid off from ICBC and now works here to support a wife and three children." The structure of outbound call centres is geared to maximum efficiency. Large computers called predictive dialers are increasingly being used to do the dialing for an entire call centre. Faster and more efficient than human fingers, they're able to screen out voice mail and fax machines, and dial multiple numbers at once. Automated dialers typically phone 10 numbers for every three available operators, because on average, only three out of every 10 calls will be answered. When the dialer detects a live human voice on the line, the call is immediately passed to a waiting operator in front of a computer screen. Without hearing "hello," the agents launch into their spiels. The instant the operator wraps up the call, a new "live" line is passed through to his or her headset. Chretien says most phone room workers will field calls this way for up to four hours at a time before being allowed a half-hour break, the minimum required by law. Computers also allow supervisors to tightly monitor entire banks of operators to ensure operators' call volumes remain high. If respondents trail off or give long-winded answers, the agent is expected to bring them back on topic. Supervisors also monitor "wrap times" - the time it takes the operator to submit the survey or enter data once the call is completed. In more strict centres like Johnson's, supervisors patrol the phone room, walking up and down the aisles watching for infractions like talking to co-workers or reading while phoning. Each employee's statistics can be called up and analyzed at any moment. On the basis of these stats, the supervisors set performance objectives for the group. It's an atmosphere described by one call centre worker who wished to remain anonymous for fear of losing her job as "Orwellian." "I feels like I'm being punished for something I didn't do," she said. "I'm constantly being watched and forced to take calls. I get sick every time I go into work because I'm so stressed." Gillian Dean has been working in call centres for more than 10 years. 1-ler telephone voice is confident, with the soft British accent and mellifluous tone of a nanny. Now employed by a unionized market research phone room that pays well and provides medical coverage, Dean has worked in non- union "sweat shops." She was paid a little over minimum wage and offered incentives based on "flow rates" - the number of sales or survey responses an operator can generate per hour. "They just wanted me to dial as much as I could, all the time." Dean still makes up to 2,000 calls in an eight hour shift, and her computer terminal still tracks the number of calls she makes, their average length and how much time she spends away from her terminal. But the information is used largely to keep track of break time and calculate incentive payments. Use of monitoring to discipline employees is the reason most telemarketing and survey companies have such high turnover, she said. "At the end of the day, they would look at your stats, and if they weren't high enough, they would say you're not good enough to do the job," said Dean. "They might put you on less lucrative surveys that dragged down your flow rate, [or] they could fire you just like that." Not all operators think the job is a bad one. Anita Parvez, like Johnson, is a middle-aged employee who's worked at the same public opinion polling company for a few years. She insists she could get a job doing anything she wants but she enjoys the call centre atmosphere, and it pays better than a fast food restaurant. "I enjoy it because I'm a talker," said Parvez. "People always say I talk too much but I guess I'm just like that." Parvez finds the work stimulating and doesn't mind being monitored. "I think [the monitoring] is good. It weeds out all the people who can't handle it. I guess I just naturally have a thick skin so it doesn't bother me." Charles Miron is another operator who spent 12 years as a ship's cook and part-time musician before finding work conducting public opinion polls two and a half years ago. Though he made the minimum rate of $8 an hour for a year before he qualified for a bonus of about $1 per hour, he said the pay is a reality of the 90s. "It's something different every day," said Miron. "Sure there are $15 and $20-an-hour jobs out there, but are you guaranteed to get the hours? I can work all the hours I want here. Some people work 11 days straight before taking a day off and then do 11 more." Marktrend Research Inc. refused to speak to the Courier about hiring practices and working conditions at the company's market research phone room. Messages left at Dylan Ryan Teleservices and other telemarketing and market research firms were not returned. Calls were transferred to lines that were never answered, phone numbers were offered that were no longer in service, and voice-mail messages were not returned. Moira Silcox, vice-president of Canadian Facts, was one of the few who did respond. Silcox said while she can't speak for her com- petitors, her company has made a concerted effort to improve working conditions. "I would say that five years ago we lagged behind and were maybe guilty of obsolete business practices, but we've im- proved," said Silcox. "We have pizza days and things like that. We try to make it a fun and friendly environment." Canadian Facts pays more than minimum wage - although Silcox wouldn't specify - and offers standard performance incentives and a medical plan for employees. Silcox admits, however, the nature of call centre work makes for high turnover rates. "We don't hire people thinking that they'll be telephone interviewers for the next 40 years or anything. We'll always have people doing it as a bridge between jobs, but we have put people through college. There are a lot of actors and people in transition working here, which is ideal for them because the hours are very flexible." One reason the exact number of outbound call centre employees in Vancouver is difficult to track is because the industry expands or shrinks according to the work available. Phone rooms survive on contracts, bidding on jobs conducting surveys for ICBC or selling health magazine subscriptions to baby boomers in Seattle. Some operations rent office space for only a few months at a time. In those conditions, high employee turnover is an advantage - some firms even use temps. Several have ads perpetually listed in the back of newspapers. In the span of a few hours, the Courier made appointments for job interviews at three call centres. Thomas Lemieux, a UBC economics professor, said lobs in the burgeoning outbound call centre industry are unlikely to disappear even if conditions and pay standards are raised. "Whenever there's talk of unionizing or raising wages in bad-paying jobs, businesses say it's bad for them," said Lemieux, "but the evidence for this is not overwhelming." He said research shows improving wages and working conditions can help the industry by making it more stable and viable. Chretien plans to soldier on in his unionizing drive, but says some companies will always want to make fast money on the backs of workers who can least afford it. "There are people out there who just thrive on abusive relationships," said Chretien, "and there are call centres out there that will force others to compete on that level. Not that they have to do business that way, but because they choose to do business that way. ====================================
