Call to Arms

Kolinko

Vol 1 #28, Summer/Autumn 2004

A Radical Enquiry

The Hotlines book describes a three-year process of enquiry into call centres, attempting to understand the situation there, workers’ behaviour during, and against, work, conflicts and interventions – through leaflets and otherwise. In this enquiry, we saw ourselves as workers, participating in struggles and trying to support their development. We had a guiding principle: make clear to other workers, and ourselves, the actions that are already being carried out. Our goal was not to enlighten ‘unreflective’ workers, but to push beyond our own limited horizons.

We want to grasp the standpoint of the collective social worker, the effects of technological change, the impact of the social and international division of labour on everyday life, the experiences of other workers in their struggles and the power they develop through them. It’s about breaking up the limited perspective which the isolating capitalist organisation of work imposes on us, blocking our own view of things.

Of course, our attempts to get an overview, to understand class conflicts and to throw our ideas into discussion – in other words, the ways and means we use for enquiries – demand a continuous debate. We used the Hotlines questionnaire mainly for reflecting our ideas and for starting discussions with other workers. Consequently, there was much it missed; it did not say much about struggles in other sectors, or about crisis, and nothing about war. Better leaflets would draw the lines between the events on the shop floor, or in the job centres, and the global transformations of capitalism – a means to encourage further discussion among workers by supplying information on other struggles. In the worst case, they won’t read that stuff or know what to do with it; in the best case, they will use it during upcoming conflicts and start to disseminate their own experiences through leaflets or other media.

We do not believe in the supposed separation between workers and militants/activists, one lot with their crazy revolutionary ideas, the other only interested in more money and job security. While there may be thousands of examples of the ‘individual worker’ – individualism and competition while searching for a job, demands in collective bargaining situations, racism against newly emigrated workers – there are also many examples of the opposite: the doctor’s receptionist who does not want to work in medical practices any more, even if she gets paid better, because she prefers being together with larger numbers of workers in a call centre; the casual worker who doesn’t give a shit about money and security and goes surfing after four months of work. Historically, there are many examples of workers acting against their economic interests – enjoying themselves by burning down their company, killing their boss and so on.

Enquiry is one method that can be used in order to understand this space between workers’ behaviour, as labour power that wants to improve its conditions, and as the class that wants to put an end to exploitation. It can do this by dealing with real processes, contradictions and tensions. Workers already make enquiries; they are interested in the wages of their foremen, conflicts in other departments, the restructuring management has planned (sometimes even in the struggles of the landless in Brazil or the unemployed in Argentina). If they don’t make such enquiries, they lose out, unprepared for the next conflict. In most cases, the division between those who are interested in what’s going on and those who are not is not a division between so-called ‘revolutionaries’ and workers but between workers themselves.

For us, the issue of our exploitation corresponds directly with that of our struggle. We don’t have to tell anyone that we/they are exploited; it’s a collective effort to understand the social dimension and structure of how this exploitation is organised. We have no desire to be militants or activists, sacrificing ourselves for an historic mission, getting on everyone’s nerves including our own. Rather, we make this choice: to deal with the situation collectively, rather than individually, whenever we have to sell our labour power or cope with the worsened conditions at job centres and the welfare office. For instance, we can decide together in which places of exploitation we want to earn our cash and, at the same time, participate collectively in conflicts. That way, our disgust for the capitalist daily routine, and our anger against the conditions and those who oppress and exploit us, can flow together into one common political project.

Enquiry is the condition, form and method of our attempts to understand the current struggle and to take part in it. Those who would still like to go into these questions in more detail from the perspective of our experiences should read the Hotlines book.

London Calling

I had heard a lot about call centres, day after day, for two years. I thought I knew what to expect.

The Company

One of the biggest market research companies in the world. They have offices, or call centres, in 36 countries, and big multinational and governmental clients. For example, the Australian General Union asked the company to conduct a survey about flexible work time. They should just have asked the company’s workers – they knew all about it already.

The Call Centre

The call centre is in London, near London Bridge, on a side street facing a high, red brick wall with barbed wire on top. A group of young Spaniards and Italians stand in front of it, the Italians swearing about Berlusconi, the Spaniards smoking weed. Two doors, one pincode, and you are inside the ‘postmodern chicken farm’, as people call it. Packed little phone booths for hundreds of interviewers. Their job is market research – phoning people in France, Italy, Spain, Germany, the UK, Ireland, randomly selected by the computer. At the end of each row are the supervisors’ desks.

The Conditions

The whole thing started with two days’ unpaid training, basic brainwashing about market research, how to use the antique computer program and so on. The second day, a really nice guy from French Reunion Island came in ten minutes late and was sent home again, unpaid, but at least only half brainwashed. The stylish, gay Asian supervisor, who regularly handed out anti-globalisation information and was a very welcome guest at various call centre workers’ parties, was able to justify giving him the sack.

After these two days, you can start working – if you get your shifts. You have to book them a week in advance, and, if there is no work, you won’t get any. The management wanted to introduce a new shift scheme, with a top list of interviewers: whoever completes the most interviews, whoever has got the least ‘idle time’ and is the most punctual and obedient worker, can choose their shifts first. If you are a miserable worker, you’ll get what’s left over. Theoretically, you can book as many shifts as you want – of course, there are some legal restrictions, but they don’t really count. I saw people working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, although that’s a sad exception.

The Work

If you press ‘y’ after the computer asks you ‘another interview?’, it starts dialling random numbers. When you are lucky, you get connected to a fax machine or a modem and you can press ‘8’, just to be asked the same question again. In between ‘8’ and ‘y’ is the kingdom of idle time, but watch it – the king or queen of idle time gets into trouble. If you are connected to another human being, you have to start asking questions.

Most sensible people hang up after hearing the word ‘market research’; all the others are usually very lonely, mentally unstable or just wrong in thinking they’re doing you a favour. We do surveys about alcoholic drinks, fast food chains, mobile phone networks, DVD players and digital cameras, cars, petrol stations, post offices and more. We do it every day, ’til nine in the evening.

Imagine phoning a small Irish village on a Sunday night to ask about DVD players. At least you can hide behind your script. You are supposed to read it from the screen, word for word. How else could you possibly think of questions like ‘Imagine Burger King is a person with its own personality. Would Burger King be introverted, bold, immature or warm-hearted?’ The average interview takes about 20 minutes; on average you do three to four interviews in a four-hour shift, the fruit of 200–300 phone calls. Rumour has it that the company gets £70 for each interview.

The Workers

From all over the world, in their 20s, most of them ‘creative’ in one way or the other. It would be wrong to say that they are ‘students’, though most of them have been. You can talk about Guy Debord with a French female artist just back from Cuba, the drummer of an Italian anarchist hardcore band, a gay second generation Turkish boy from Cologne who is studying fashion design, a traditional Asian Muslim man from the East End, a girl from a village in the Alps with a population of 50 who just arrived in London – all in a four-hour shift. I’ve never worked in a place before where people were so critical and verbally able to dismiss their work, even capitalism, as such. But I have also hardly ever seen people accepting such mind-numbing work and patronising management behaviour. Because it’s just a job for a while? Because they

mainly did that kind of job after quitting school or university? Because of the week-to-week shift system? I still don’t have a clue why.

The Supervision

There is one supervisor for 10–20 interviewers, monitoring the idle time, counting interviews and attempts, listening to what you say and how you say it. They come to your desk if you are not dialling for five minutes; they give you bad marks if you don’t stick to the script. They walk around and tell you to put your book or newspaper back into your rucksack and to take the coffee back to the coffee machine, because hot drinks are not allowed. For an extra pound an hour and the privilege of not having to be on the phone, they wear themselves out.

The Sabotage

It starts with small things. Little drawings or scribbles in each phone booth. A lot of ‘Leave your brain at the entrance’ stuff. Someone is constantly stuffing the toilets with toilet rolls, so the management put out these notices: ‘Whoever is putting paper down the toilets, please stop it. It is unnecessary, unhygienic and causes inconvenience for everybody.’ The next day, people cross out the ‘It’, replacing it with ‘Market Research’, or the name of the most hated supervisor.

We started collective slam poetry, handing poem lines from neighbour to neighbour. Sometimes, we used the computer as well, pressing the right combination of codes to keep the computer dialling, assuming that there are only fax machines at the other end. But that’s risky: the supervisor could be monitoring you. Sometimes, especially with lonely elderly people, we live out our social worker tendencies, talking about gardening and the new priest in the community, instead of fast food chains. Some Spanish guys developed a funny threesome, using the headset, passing the receiver on to the neighbour, so that the confused respondent talked to two interviewers. We faked the management instructions that are placed in every phone booth, calling for the return of the Idle Time King and mass orgies.

During Saturday shifts, there is a higher level of drug consumption. That’s when most of the weird stuff happens. Receivers at the supervisors’ desks glued to the phones, people pretending to be preachers or radio show presenters. But there was never a real collective action. Once, on a Saturday, 15 minutes before the end of a nine-hour shift, the supervisors circling to make sure we keep on dialling, some French girls suddenly started to cheer and applaud like crazy. All the pent-up energy broke loose and the whole call centre joined in, then packed their stuff and left five minutes early. We were never able to repeat that.

The End

In the end, after six months, I had my fair share of disciplinary meetings, but wanted to leave anyway. It was my first and last call centre job. I found interesting people there, situations of solidarity and flirtation, a real friend. In political terms, I am less sure. Perhaps the most radical act would have been to elect a shop steward or get rid of the zero-hour contracts and arbitrary management behaviour. But what for? To tie people even closer to this madness by offering proper contracts? By that measure, it would have become clear that we are workers with rights and our own interests. But why channel energy into producing formally correct working relations when there is all this disgust towards this kind of work, all this pent up creative anger?

What I missed here was a group of more experienced people, politically and job-wise, with whom to reflect on the situation. At first, I thought a leaflet, for example, about the new shift system, would be kind of ‘external’, so I just talked to my neighbours, made little drawings, like everyone did. But maybe something on paper, demanding a collective action and handed out to everyone, would have forced all of us to define a position. Who knows?