Unions

After the Gold Rush

By Noel Hester - ASU Services Branch Media Officer

Call centres are the boom industry and governments everywhere are touting them as major job creators - particularly in regional areas.

But increasingly unions are hearing more and more from disgruntled workers in this emerging technology industry with horror stories of conditions and pay.

Call centres in Australia have a 25% growth rate - in Europe they are growing at an astonishing 40% per year.

They have an infrastructure investment of $2 billion and they employ about 60,000 people - mainly women earning between $24,000 and $32,000 a year. They have been described as the fastest growth industry since the gold rush.

The stress of technology

As a new industry, call centres are largely unregulated and with low levels of unionisation. And in their present form call centres subject their `agents' to breathtaking levels of surveillance and stress.

The agents are constantly visible and the supervisor's power has been rendered perfect via computer monitoring.

Agents are logged onto a computer for eight hours a day, and can have the duration of their calls and their every movement monitored by the technology.

There is no control by the workers over the calls taken - the calls are often force fed without gaps.

This application of the technology and the exhausting shift patterns create difficult and stressful working environments.

Adrian Hodgson an ASU delegate at TeleTech's call centre , says the monitoring is oppressive.

`It's 1984, big brother stuff. Quality assurance in a call centre is basically stand-over bullying and pressure,' he said.

`The stress is HUGE!!! There is a 24 hour a day, 7 day working week with shift rostering at the company's discretion. It's an American working culture, with teams and team-leaders and a shape up or ship out mentality,' he said.

Such oppressive monitoring leads to low morale and bad customer relations. It also contributes to the high churn rates (staff turnover) which plague the industry.

British studies have found that eighteen months is usually about as much as a computer telephonist can cope with.

Low pay and less `churn' make regions flavour of the month

Regional areas - with their high unemployment - are the prominent growth areas for call centres. These areas are attractive as churn rates are lower than in the main centres as are wages and rent. Governments have also been quick to dole out tax breaks and land packages as incentives to attract the labour-intensive centres to depressed areas.

While the industry whinges about the public perception of call centres as modern day sweat-shops the Australian Services Union has attracted plenty of interest from employees fed up with poor pay, stressful workloads and lack of job recognition.

In Wollongong, employees at Wire Data Services - a British IT company - joined the union on mass when their jobs were technically downgraded by the company from help desks to call centres, undermining employee claims for better pay in line with their increasing IT skills.

Despite protestations to the contrary it says volumes about many employers' perceptions about their industry.

In Newcastle the union has been picking up new members with frequent stories of wild west working conditions, cowboy employers and atrocious pay and conditions.

Call centres need an award and standards

Not all employers are like this. Some, like Sitel and Sydney Water in Sydney and the Newcastle Building Society are showing commitment to improving job conditions by working with the union and the local community.

ASU organiser Sally McManus says there are three main issues that need to be confronted by the industry.

`There is no award for call centre staff. There are no standards set for the monitoring of employees. And the levels of stress are very high' she said.

`There's a lot of talk about jobs being created in the regions - but what sort of jobs are they going to be? This is something that only the union movement is talking about. The industry, academics and governments talk a lot about bums on seats but they're silent on the nature and quality of these jobs.'

Creating high skilled, high paid jobs

Another contributing factor to staff turnover is the lack of long term job satisfaction. The forced pace of the work eans there is little meaningful interaction with customers. There are also limited opportunities for career progression.

But the potential exists for call centres to provide rewarding and well paid employment. Many call centre positions are highly skilled and are at the leading edge of customer service delivery.

The Lufthansa call centre in Melbourne takes reservation calls from Australia, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore. It also can take advantage of the time zone differences to take out of hours calls from Europe and North America.

Lufthansa's technically skilled and multilingual workforce centre can provide customers worldwide with a 24 hour airline telephone reservations service.

The industry has been its own worst enemy with its failure to resolve issues of low pay and lack of skills recognition. Staff turnover is costly with the training of staff costing up to $10,000 per agent.

Independent academic research backs the ASU's own findings that call centres with collective agreements have lower staff turnover, higher employee satisfaction and lower levels of stress.

The potential for the call centre industry is excellent. But the challenge lies before the industry to work with unions to ensure call centre jobs are well paid and rewarding if this potential is to be fulfilled.

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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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