Anyone work in a call centre?

It's a fecking case study into call centres! What did you want, an insurrectionary strike, situationist grafitti on the walls and a heroic but futile death of a communist too beautiful for this world?

I talked to one of them personally, and they are on the ball. The book is good if boring, and frankly if we had such things for all industries it'd be a true asset. Props to proleposition

I used to work in a call centre. I quite liked it though.

Spent three years in a call centre, got fired for trying to organise a union.

True.

I managed to be off my phone 6 hours of an 8 hour shift once. By far my proudest work-related achievement to date

I worked 8 days total in 3 different call centres when I was in Brighton, they were fucking horrible especially the one where I was trying to sell insurance. Didn't make a single sale. Give me bus driving any day where I only lie to the customers ocassionally for minor laughs.

PS. M. from p-p's a cool dude but yes very German.

I worked in a call centre for three months and failed to get fired even though I was shit at it. As the job is based around selling people stuff they don't need it's pretty shitty, they monitor how many calls you make, how long for, how long you log off for etc. It's pretty crappy. That said the people I worked with were sound, although you had to wonder about how fucking honest/callous they were to sell Well Woman Plus cancer insurance. The problem with organising a strike is that attendance was fucking atrocious. On a sunny day easily half the people would just not bother coming in. We got a bonus for coming in every day and we got docked for being late but most people didn't bother.
As I only got commission once I used to go in every day cause I needed the money.

Yeah, I used to work in a call centre, horrible work.

I got pally with a few people there and we mentioned organising a union of some kind but I was sacked soon after (not for union organising but just coz I was shit and never hit targets!).

I guess the closest I ever got to anything resembling collective action was when they tried to make everyone on our team (about 15 people) stand up until they made two sales. We all sat down immediately after returning to work citing backpain/health and safety when they told us to stand up again. Seriously, it was like the Barcelona May Days. Except we won.

Also, one of the other girls who worked there taught me how to make it so you first set your break clock back to zero and then set your screen to 'Awaiting Call' but actually no calls would come through. I think she showed me coz she fancied me a bit

Can't really give you any tips on organising apart from try and go out for a pint with your co-workers and sound out some cool people and work from there. If I hadn't gotten sacked, I reckon we could've organised something coz there was a group of about ten of us who hung out together and were talking about organising.

Finally, get a different job. Telesales is shit

I work in one atm, not much going in terms of organising. Things is its telesales and brighton so people will just leave if they don;t like the job. Turnover is immense, of 15 people who started on my team six months back only 3 are still there. The issues are all fairly straight up, salary and management imposition of discipline.
Some of the inbound centres have lower turnover rates and more capacity to organise at some of them have unions, However ,of the big inbounds near me we've known people who tried to do stuff there and got nowhere.

In brighton the best way of doing it woud be to go for a broader network consisting of people from all sorts of centres, thus you'd sort of be able to at least alleviate some of the deadening effect of high turnover rates.
Problem is most people don;t give a shit about the job, thus the shop model has severe limits, i mean most conversations about how shit work is often end up with ''fuck it i'll probably go back on the building sites in a month or two'', which is fair enough. I think the extent to which this is the case varies form place to place, afterall the bigger employers like amex and lloyds may have a high turnover and have some of the same attitudes but salaries are a little bit higher, overtimes more readily available, and they also have a higher proportion of admin staff. Certainly lloyds do, all their admin and warehouse stuff is based around here and haywards heath also and thus they are more likley to have union presences, although for example they do have a tendency to outsource departments a lot, a lot of their IT got TUPED for example.

God i used to sit next to those campaign teams, such a mind numbingly appalling thing to have to sell. Afterall if someone you cold call actually has cancer, you can't sell them cancer insurance can you.

I used to.
got fired after 1 month, because i was not selling enough wine (yes, we were selling crap wine by phone, in italy...!).
No unions, workers were isolated individuals trying to reach selling targets. Many people used to think like the bosses.
There were 2 "team leaders", wage earning bosses' pets, their job was just to whip on us/encourage us.

here in italy, people working in call centers often think like "it's a temporary situation....i'm not a 'call center worker', i'm an individual waiting for something better...in the interim i do some stuff here".
so it's hard to find some "class counsciousness"....or build a union... also because working contracts (how do you call these legal agreement in english?) are very short.
some people renew his contract every week... these workers don't know if they will be allowed to work there the next day.
if a guy raise his head, he just lose his job.

it's NOT like the classic factory.

I am currently working in on, it sucks although I am quitting in a week, its is by far the most controlled job I have ever worked in, the bosses in the center have a sort of prision guard mantality, most people get drunk or high before coming in to make it tolerable.

my other half works in a call centre, and it's actually pretty good as far as workplaces go... bear in mind however that it's a unionized call centre for a credit union. there are still things like surveillance, ridiculous sales targets, etc. but those sorts of things aside it seems pretty good.

I don't have any experience with organizing call centres personally, but I have a friend who was an inside committee member on one (which was eventually successfully organized)... and yeah, your dark satanic mills comment seems fairly spot on. Apparently the employer purchased giant televisions to display anti-union messages inside and outside the call centre. The whole place sounded rather orwellian.

Anyone currently working in one in the US? If so, give me your libcom user name when you call me and I won't slam the phone down. Matter of fact, I'll keep you on as long as possible.

I've organised in a Call Centre before. It's pretty frustrating for all the reasons people have mentioned, mainly the staff turnover and the employer's ability to pull up loads of - mostly irrelevant - stats to "prove" calls are being dropped or whatever when they want to sack someone unjustifiably.

I'd say the principles of organising are basically the same as elsewhere: make sure you have a thorough knowledge of the law regarding union membership and recognition, choose a union that will back you and give you advice and assistance when you need it (not three days later) and initially only discuss the proposal with people you trust.

Go public when a few of you have signed up, spread the word amongst your co-workers about the benefits of membership without being too preacher-like (pointing out that union grades recieve on average 17% higher wages for the same non-unionised post is more effective than didactic rants initially), approach management about your intentions and be prepared to go to the CAC, an EAT or the jobcentre dependant on your skills, length of service, etc and the management's determination not to unionise.

Always offering to represent your fellow workers in disciplinarys and so on no matter how you feel about them or their actions will soon give the union/would-be union reps a reputation, especially when you start to win cases.

Once you're trusted by the workforce and recognised by the employer how political your branch becomes is totally dependant on how much time and support you can gather.

Hey All. I have worked in call centres on and off for about 8 years. Actually I have an over the phone interview for one starting in 4 minutes. Some of us in Brisvegas have talked about starting a collective but at the moment it is only words....
cheers
Dave