Interview

The Call of the Wild

Interview with Peter Lewis

We meet a union organiser who's taking the union message into the call centres.

	Sally McManus

Sally McManus has been organising for five years since she graduated in the first intake of the ACTU's Organising Works program. She's been working in information technology and call centres for the last couple of years, with one of the three unions who are active in the area. While she was at university she worked in a call centre selling house-cladding.

Tell us what you have been doing to organise call centres?

At the moment the Australian Services Union is conducting a national survey focussing on stress and other conditions of employment. We've been distributing them outside the major non-union call centres in Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong. These surveys have the union's phone number on them and we're receiving lots of calls from people. We've received about 1,000 back, which is really encouraging and more importantly makes the findings statistically significant. The reason we are handing the surveys out the front is that we are not given access to the workplace.Under the law, you need to have members to get inside.

What are the main issues workers raise when they talk to you?

The number one issue is stress from too many calls; excessive call monitoring and inadequate breaks from the phones. People also worry about career paths, they don't want to be on phones for the rest of their lives, they want to go somewhere in the company,. Thirdly, pay - there's no award in the industry so it's purely set buy market forces. Few of the big call centres want to pay shift allowances for night work and weekend work, so there's a constant downwards pressure on wages. There's also a push towards incentive payments for taking calls quickly and getting through them faster. The problem with this is you end up with competing pressures : good service and respect to the caller at the same time as feeling pressure to get them off the phone quicker.

The industry sells itself on its flexibility, but it's not a great job for a working mother. The shifts are often at night or weekends, when you want to be with your kids. There's often rotating shifts, so there's no stability about that either. The flexibility is all the employer's way

Is there a typical call centre and what does it look like?

A typical one would have 60 seats, organised cubicles so you can't see the person you're next to. They rotate the seats so you don't have a set desk. There's a phone with a head-set, a computer in front of you. The team leader is normally in an elevated position where they can best supervise everyone. And there's a big screen recording the number of calls waiting. When Bentham invented his panopticon, he could have been thinking of the call centre!

What reaction do you get from workers when you present yourself as a union official.

Workers are quite interested, because a lot of them don't know there's a union for the industry. The issues we bring up really resonate with them and there's a feeling out there amongst people in the industry that call centres could be a better place to work. The biggest difficult is getting in to talk to them.

How have you been using the internet to help you organise?

We rely a lot on e-mail, most workers will have access at their terminals, although there's real issues with security in terms of the company monitoring email. Most are also online at home and we create our networks around mailing lists so we can discuss issues and have virtual meetings. This gets around the fact that people are working 24 hours and we can can't physically meet with them.

What's your best victory in a call centre?

There was one in Wollongong where there was an issue of pay and under-staffing. The workers contacted the ASU, because they read about it in the media, and we helped them get organised. Organising means getting workers to talk to each other and understand their bargaining power and stand up for themselves. When the workers started looking organised the bosses freaked and gave them the pay-rise they were after to avoid any "trouble".

Is the fact that many of the employers are controlled by overseas companies a problem?

A lot of the call centres are operated by American companies. They see themselves as global companies and equate that with US conditions, so when they come to Australia they expect the same conditions. Some even give them the US staff handbook! Most are viciously opposed to unions and don't want to change the system they have.

What's the difference between a good employer and a bad employer?

The good employers will involve the union -- they don't feel threatened if their workforce is organised and listen to the views of their employees. Some actually recognise the industry can benefit from a collective workforce. The good employers want to get rid of the cowboys as well; really low wage rates are a threat to them, because their work can be outsourced to a lower wage competitor.

One argument against unionising call centres is that the team structure of call centres make collective superfluous. What's your response?

I think the team structure strengthens it. Team culture can assist in building a union culture. People are already used to working together and the union is just an extension of that. The negative side of team culture is that it can be used as a tool to increase surveillance and make people feel guilty for not working themselves into the ground because they fear they are letting the team down.

Some people dismiss call centres as McJobs, what's your view?

They don't have to be. Call centres where there are career paths, recognition for working unsociable shifts and where the employer genuinely listens to their employees are much happier places, the staff turnover rates are lower and the job can be really fulfilling,. Some people try to cast the industry as a low-skill industry, I don't believe that's true. You need a high level of interpersonal skills, problem solving and conflict resolution to deal with a whole range of customers, clients and stressful situations. not everyone can do that. There's also an increasing demand for technical and language skills, so you're seeing specialised jobs within call centres developing.

How do you feel when you see government promoting call centres as a growth industry?

I find it a bit frustrating that they are completely silent on the quality of these jobs. I think it's a problem when companies chase low-wage areas, rather than being prepared to invest in a workforce. The government needs to set some minimum conditions so that the jobs they create are decent ones and the people in there are not exploited.

If someone works in a call centre and they're not happy about what's going on, what should they do?

Talk to their fellow workers to see if they share the some concerns and contact me at the Australian Services Union, or one of the other unions involved. If you're in the finance industry, that would be the Finance Sector Union; or the CPSU if you are in a government-run centre..

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  Issue 12 contents

»	Push for Decent Call Centres
»	Shaw Unveils Second Wave
»	Union Raises the Roof for Beryl
»	Cotter Withdraws Currawong Standover Claims
»	Reith Second Wave Will Prolong Industrial Disputes
»	It�s Rio Telstra -- Union Braces for Attack
»	Fears of AWA Push in State Rail
»	Age Tele-Centre Seeks Pay Equity
»	Advocate Ads to be Referred to Auditor-General, ACCC
»	Labor Council to Stage Pre-Drug Summit

»	Guest Report
»	Sport
»	Trades Hall
»	Piers Watch

»	Wran Wrong on Wrepublic
»	Digging the Dirt-Digging

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