[The links below overrun the screen, so copy then open in browser, rather than click.] "Women On Standby: Call Girls of the Global Market" Hearing of the Alternative Economic Summit to the G7/8 Summit June 1999 Cologne Convened and organised by the NGO Womens Forum German Platform of Women in Development Europe (WIDE) in cooperation with the Heinrich B�ll Foundation and the German Welthungerhilfe <http://www.labournet.de/branchen/dienstleistung/CallGirls-Content+Preface.h tml> --------- "Examples of Union-Based Resistance from Two Countries: Sabine Morgenroth und Karen Dowling" Sabine Morgenroth Live Wire In the fall of last year, workers in the trade union, HBV (trade, banks, and insurance companies), came together at both the Citifinanzberatungs GmbH Bochum (better known as Citiphone-banking Bochum), and the Fachh�ndler-Service in Duisburg. Here they united to fight against the shutdown and integration of their companies into a new Citibank office building in Duisburg. Citifinanzberatungs, or Citibank's financial consulting department, and the Fachh�ndler-Service, or the retail service department in Duisburg, are both Citibank call centers. The workers united under the slogan 'Auf Draht', which is a play on words which combines 'on the ball' with 'on the phone' and is best expressed by the notion of a 'live wire'). The rest at http://www.labournet.de/branchen/dienstleistung/CallGirls-CallCe-Morgenroth.htm l ---------- Karen Dowling Call Center Ireland My name is Karen Dowling. I am a member of the national executive council of the communications workers union in the republic of Ireland. My union has approximately 2o ooo members, which is considered a large union in Ireland. We represent the majority of workers in the Irish Post Office and in the Irish Telecom Company. I.e. we have 8o% of the membership in Eircell, the mobile phone subsidary of Telecom Eireann. We have also organized workers in two other major call centers. One is owned by the post office parcel service - SDS and the other is known as TSS which is a customer service company run by irish telecom. The call center phenomena is new and does not have existing staff representation structures. However in the past this work was predominantly performed in house by the parent company and has only recently been outsourced by a large number of companies. One of the effects of this approach is that it allows the companies to bypass the existing collective agreements in the parent company, that could mean lower wages and an increase in the number of temporary part time agents. Traditionally a lot of these parent companies are unionized. The rest at http://www.labournet.de/branchen/dienstleistung/CallGirls-CallCent-KarenDow. html -------------- Case History: Call Centre in Nordrhein-Westfalen Andrea Reischies "ABC Europe, hello, my name is Ramona Schneider." This is the kind of greeting one is likely to hear constantly emerging from some 40 cubicles in which not much more than the women's eyes can be seen. To say that they are telephone operators does not adequately describe their job � because besides answering calls, they are required to type up orders on their PCs, check clients' addresses, as well as stock up the appointment books of the bank's sales representatives and service representatives. These are some of the responsibilities of a telephone operator, or call-center agent, as they are now called. It is a fairly new profession that is becoming popular because of the 'Call-Center Offensive' initiated by the federal state of Nordrhein-Westfalen. 30,000 new jobs have been created in Germany in the past year, mainly in the banking, insurance, mail order, tourism, electronic data processing, telecommunications, and energy supply sectors. It is expected that by the year 2001, another 140,000 jobs will have been created. The rest at http://www.labournet.de/branchen/dienstleistung/CallGirls-CallCen-Reischies. html -- Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.alexia.net.au/~www/mhutton/index.html Sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop Subscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=subscribe%20leftlink Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20leftlink
