If you’ve ever had an issue with your phone or internet service that you couldn’t figure out on your own, you probably called in and had a chat with a customer service representative. There’s a good chance the person you spoke to worked out of a call center.
Here in the United States, there are tens of thousands of them that employ millions of workers across the country.
Debbie Goldman wrote about how this industry operates and how it’s changing in her new book “Disconnected: Call Center Workers Fight for Good Jobs in the Digital Age.”
Goldman is the former research director of the labor union, Communications Workers of America. She joined Texas Standard to discuss her new book.
Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below:
Texas Standard: When did call centers as we think of them today come to be and what did those jobs first look like?
Debbie Goldman: We always had business offices that would take calls from customers, particularly in the telephone industry. But what we imagine now as call centers – the big warehouse-sized call centers in which calls may be coming from anywhere in the country, or even globally – probably began in the 1980s as the cost of long distance and then international calls went down.
And at the same time, the switching technology moved to digital switches that then could transfer calls from anywhere in the country or even globally.
In the early call centers, of course, all the records were paper records. And my book, “Disconnected,” begins with that period and then tracks what the changes were as the records went onto the computers and these big call centers became the norm.
This allowed the employers, whether it was the telephone companies or other companies, to use the same switches that were directing the calls to the customer service reps to track what was going on, how many calls were coming in, and therefore to eliminate any downtime for the customer service reps to increase the speed up and to track how long they were on a call, in what manner they were talking, what sales they were doing, what they were pitching, how they were doing their keystrokes.
And so a job that had given a great deal of autonomy, or some autonomy, to the customer service rep instead became one that was very controlled by the digital technology. And that led to an enormous amount of stress on the customer service rep and a degradation in the working conditions.
Well, I’m betting that that leads into my next question, which was going to be about labor organizing in call centers. I’m not sure most people think of call centers when they think of labor organizing, but can you talk about that history?
Most call centers, the workers do not have collective representation in a union.
However, in the communication industry, those companies that came out of the once-monopoly Bell system… So that would be in Texas, AT&T, that would be Verizon Communications – not the wireless company but the wireline company – those company’s had a union, the Communications Workers of America, after World War II.
And so, for the most part, the telephone industry call centers were unionized. However, the wireless industry was not. And this is a very relevant story for Texas.
Beginning in the 1990s, as wireless communications, your cell phones, began to grow, the call centers were not union. But the Communications Workers of America that represented the people at then-Southwestern Bell, which eventually was bought and renamed AT&T Mobility, the Communication Workers of America, or CWA, began to see that’s where communications was going – wireless and internet – and therefore used the power of the union on the telephone side in collective bargaining to press then-Southwestern Bell and eventually AT&T to be neutral when their wireless employees said, “yes, we do want a union.”
After five years of those kinds of conversations and of wireless employees, customer service reps, people in the retail stores, pressing for a union, in 1997 Southwestern Bell said, “okay, if our employees want a union, we are not going to fire them. We are not going to shut down the call centers. We’ll let them have their own voice to decide: do they or do they not want a union?”
And, would you know, that universally they chose to have union representation. And now all of the employees at AT&T Mobility, wherever they are in the country, are represented by CWA.
Well, when people think of offshoring, I guess sending jobs overseas, call center representatives are one of the main professions that might come to mind. How often does that actually happen?
It happens quite a lot. Initially, the companies, once competition came in, once there was less regulation of the quality of work, the companies were approached by these big global call center companies and said,“you know, if you outsource to us, we don’t have a union. We’ll be able to lower your labor costs.”
And under pressure from competition, searching for the lowest common denominator – I would call it the” low road” – companies began to outsource.
And then these big call center companies said, “you know, if you let us send the calls offshore, we’re going to save a huge amount of money for you,” because those people make maybe $1 an hour compared to the $25, $30 or $40 an hour a unionized service rep might be making in the United States.
First, the calls were sent to India. But eventually now, the largest source of offshoring call center work is to the Philippines. More than a million Filipinos work in call centers.
Now things are changing again. More and more AI is influencing the labor force. Do we know how this will affect call centers just yet? Is it already?
It is already, although I would call it a lot of experimentation. The companies are not really sure how AI is going to affect the interaction with their customers.
Now let’s remember, it’s not only voice communications, it’s also chatting over the internet. Chatbots have arrived in the interaction between a customer and the – I wouldn’t even call it a call center now – but the customer who wants to interact over a question about their bill, ordering new services, a technical problem.
The companies are experimenting and what we hear from our members is they don’t really know how this is going to impact their ability to keep their customers. And I think probably every one of your listeners now has an experience where they get caught in what I call an “endless circle” of a chatbot that isn’t really able to solve their problem.
Now let’s hope that our companies come to realize that that is negative for their ability to retain customers. But if they’re competing with others that use chatbots and we’re doing a race to the bottom, all we can do as consumers is complain, complain, complain, and the problem is who do you complain to?
