a worthless existence

The Workhouse

For those of you who have never worked in a call centre allow me to educate you. They are essentially a modern day Dickensian workhouse; the twenty first centuries’ ‘Do the Boys Hall’. Engraved above the electronic revolving doors that count the cattle in and out should be a quote from Dante’s Inferno ‘Abandon hope all you who enter’. In days gone by we had a northern landscape scarred by a carpet of chimneys bellowing their thick putrid smog over the industrial skyline. Today we are fooled into the misconception of a ‘white collar’ existence by the collapse of manufacturing and the rise of the service industry replacing factories with shiny new office buildings and call centre workhouses. The truth of the matter is that there is a serious blur in the demarcation between office and factory. I work in a call centre in the North West of England in a town nestled on the banks of the River Mersey. It is an area once proud of its working class heritage forged from the chemical industry. Today it is symptomatic of most other industrial towns and cities across the country that employs more people in call centres than in steel, coal and car making combined. A deplorable inditement on British Industrialism. As I file in through the doors each morning and the long skylight ceiling arches high above me, I scramble to find a desk and log in before I am registered as being one minute late. Four of these offences and it’s a disciplinary procedure! The call centre is a hive of activity and the clamour of a thousand voices is there to greet you each morning. Like most others, this call centre is ideally located in an ex-industrial area where unemployment is highest allowing the employers to dictate working conditions where there is a healthy feeding ground of low skilled and ill-educated people. There has always been a high turn over of staff and this is common place in the call centre environment. The lucky ones find jobs the rest, like me, are stuck there. Employees are strictly monitored in their performance and targets. Breaks and lunches are scrupulously regulated and we are even monitored on how often we visit the toilet and for how long! We have signs in our toilets pinned to the wall asking ‘do you know how many people are waiting to speak to you?’ Couldn’t give a shit is my honest hand on heart opinion before closing the cubicle door behind me. We have even received emails from the soft white underbelly of what passes for management at a call centre requesting that we ‘seek a managers approval before visiting the lavatory due to the high volume of calls queuing.’ It is not since the Victorian times of the workhouse that employees have endured such a draconian monitoring and lack of autonomy in the work place. Despite the ‘white collar’ guise, the call centre in reality is nothing more than a production line job in a modern day factory where every element of a workers day is closely scrutinised. How ironic that the firm I work for sponsor televisions ‘Big Brother,’ Orwell would have a field day. The hierarchy in the call centre is intricately layered. There are many levels of management and sub-management, seconded managers, trainee managers, management development, team coaches and trainee team coaches. These are the company’s sacrosanct, the list is endless. At the bottom of this pile is the shop floor worker, the call takers, the expendable masses, me. Our calls are routinely monitored and almost every move you make is observed and recorded. Quite Literally big brother is watching. The Team Coach is one of the most intriguing roles in a call centre. It is intrinsically his or her job to see if you are happy and have any problems (this gets asked whenever you are not on a call as a hint to resume with your work). The whole building is divided into individual teams; each team has both a manager and a team coach. Both roles are two a penny in a call centre and mean very little in the real world of business management. The manager of each team seemingly has one real main responsibility which is to monitor who is taking calls and who is not at any one time, and to bellow with breath taking monotony at advisors to ‘take some calls please!’ It is very much akin to the role of a coxswain bawling at his oarsmen to ‘row, row, row!’ But in this instance we feel more like the slaves in the belly of a giant Roman Galleon rowing to the whip. Conditions seem unlikely to improve in the foreseeable future. Recently the company I am employed by announced proposals to reduce wages and holiday entitlements to improve profitability whilst shamelessly rewarding its chief executive with a mouth watering seventeen percent pay increase. This suggests an ‘Animal Farm’ ethos of ‘some animals are more equal than others’. If recent speculation is to be believed though, the future of the service industry lies in India with 100,000 jobs being lost there over the next five years. My company already has a call centre operating there where the staff are instructed to advise callers that they are based in Leeds. I have a vision of low paid sweatshops, children sat stitching sports company’s trainers whilst also taking calls for mobile companies earning a Rupee a week. Perhaps this isn’t an image they wish to fervently promote. Stress and long term sickness are a huge problem as staff numbers are kept to the absolute minimum. Many call centres are aiming towards twenty four-hour opening with pressure on existing staff to cover these shifts with very little choice in the matter. Customers are becoming more and more irate as increasing call queues leave them waiting on the lines listening to Vivaldi or other popular classical favourites that help us forget that we are in a queue. This incessant demand is being met through the employment of agency staffing in favour of full time fully trained employees. The reason is obvious, they have no contracts, no access to the benefits of a full time employee, they can be paid less and more importantly they can be used until they are no longer required and released without a notice period. In effect they are the work house paupers with very little hope of receiving a full time contract of employment. If my experience in a call centre has taught me one thing it is to pursue a more remunerative course of employment with a sense of urgency. There are little if any career prospects and with more and more work being farmed out to India the future seems positively bleak. A position where permission to visit the lavatory is not a prerequisite of the job would be a distinct advantage. The more time I spend tied to the telephone the closer I come to forging my retirement carriage clock, cog by cog to carry like a burden of regret into my old age.