Kolinko: Taylorization of Services in the Call Centre Sector

The second case will be an inquiry undertaken by the German collective Kolinko in the years 1999-2002. The reasons for starting the inquiry were the strike at a Citibank call centre as well as the expansion of the sector in Europe in the 1990s. The researchers describe call centres as ‘communication assembly lines’ and see them as a part of a more general process of deskilling of the labour force:

especially in the banking sector the new work organisation of a call centre made it possible to attack the white collar employees’ position. The tasks of a ‘formally highly qualified’ bank worker with several years of training are now executed by call centre workers, after two days of training, for about two thirds of the white collar wage and subject to much stricter controls as well as much higher workloads. … The problem for management is that often they are not able to see what is really happening in complex workflows and thus are not able to measure, control, and ultimately increase the amount of work delivered. Therefore they have to divide those complex processes into simple single tasks. The transition from artisans to the factory went like that, and it’s no different

in the call centre, even if customer cases are being processed, rather than metal or wood.

(Kolinko, 2002, emphasis added)

The members of the collective state that the same processes take place in industrial and in service sectors. No wonder they are very sceptical about the concept of immaterial labour, seeing it as a part of capitalism’s attempt of presenting deskilling as a passage to the ‘new economy’:

There has been a lot of ideological drivel concerning call centres.… they re- packaged capitalism as a ‘service society’ and emphasised how much we need call centres as a ‘new kind of service’.… call centres were sold as a kind of new economy for the unskilled. (Kolinko, 2002)

Workers – human interfaces between a database and the customer – are subjected to insecure working conditions: time-limited contracts, sometimes one-day contracts (as in Audioservice in Berlin) or even, as in the case of Atesia in Italy, imposition of self-employment. The fluctuation of staff prevents the exchange of knowledge and the building of solidarity. The call centre sector is also feminized (about 60% of the employees are women).

Call centres use technologies that ensure both the control of workers’ activities and the intensification of work; they prescribe the pace of work, as well as determine the sequence of steps undertaken by the worker:

The connection of computer- and telephone devices allows a higher call rhythm and a strict control of the workers (through statistics on the call amount, breaks, etc.). The computer-software only allows us certain operations and a certain chronological order which we have to perform them in. The calls are automatically put through to our phones (‘Automatic Call Distribution, ACD’ – [central, computer-controlled telephone machine]), sometimes even without us picking up the phone – straight to the headset (‘direct-to-ear’). That way they want to prevent us having any control over the amount of calls we accept. In outbound, after finishing one call, often the computer starts dialling up the next customer so we have no time to take a breath (‘power dialler’).… Many call centres… register every step the worker does on the phone – accepting the call, duration of the call... – and the worker has to push buttons on the ‘Call Master’, a kind of telephone with loads of buttons. There is a button for every kind of break: official break, loo, training, post-processing. (Kolinko, 2002)

The double task of surveillance and the maximization of productivity is also facilitated by performance quotas that entail: arbitral set ratios of calls per hour or per day and statistics used to create new norms; personal statistics of each worker; and daily statistics displayed in the workplace. In addition, workers are inspected individually by way of mystery calls. The organization of work serves the same purpose. Teamwork, for example, makes employees control each other:

the teams are just a way to form smaller, ‘easy-to-control’ units out of the mass of workers. That way the management has less difficulties getting through measures to intensify work. Teams are formed to channel conflicts and, if possible, to sweep them under the carpet. (Kolinko, 2002)

The concentration of workers in one place is also part of the surveillance/exploitation system. Technically, call centre agents could work at home; but concentration, making training and surveillance easier, is eventually better than isolation, which could amount to granting them too much autonomy. It also enables direct cooperation between workers and between workers and management – but this applies only to some call centres; in others direct communication between workers is not needed and therefore kept down.

Creativity is not well received in most call centres; the workers are supposed to use standard phrases or the script prescribing the content of the whole conversation: ‘A conversation is supposed to be ninety percent pre- phrased from the script. Not only the words are pre-phrased but also what you emphasise, how you raise and lower your voice’ (Kolinko, 2002).

This is problematic, as in many cases the employees feel forced to diverge from the scripts, not only because using them is unnatural and embarrassing, but also because it leaves a bad impression with the customer. A ‘natural’ way of talking is perceived by them as a better way of establishing a relation with the customer. Scripts seem to be counterproductive, serving only to limit workers’ creativity. This phenomenon seems to support Hardt and Negri’s thesis on the autonomy of biopolitical labour. Still, many call centres persistently rely on standard phrasings; this may indicate that it is an important feature of the productivity of this sector. Why? The answer could be the following: the requirement of using standard phrases and the script, besides being the most efficient way of guaranteeing that the employee will present the whole offer to the customer, are a part of the brand identity, and this identity, in addition to the particular goods or the advice, is what is really sold by the call centres.

There are exceptions to this picture: creativity and the interest in software are encouraged in some of the call centres (mostly in those that belong to software producers); even private activities are tolerated to some extent:

Everyone is surfing and e-mailing but it’s not forbidden either. After all, it’s part of your ‘training’.… A lot of people do it because they’re interested in it... or because they want to show the team leaders that they’re interested... or to pass time. (Kolinko, 2002)

But sometimes this private interest in software is used to limit the communication between employees:

In the call centre where I work lots of workers loaded PC games onto their computers or surfed the internet during breaks or wrote private e-mails or stuff like that. That didn’t necessarily make the breaks shorter so management restricted the use of the internet to certain sites and deleted all games from the computers. The only thing they left was some paint program. First we wondered why they left us a fucking paint program that we really don’t need for work. Then you could see that during the breaks a lot of people played with the paint program thus remaining at their desks, while others loitered

around the coffee machine talking to each other. That showed us why. (Kolinko, 2002)