The scope of this research is confined to the City of Johannesburg in Gauteng province, South Africa; the single site focus allowed for the in-depth analysis of the local state labour process giving priority to workers’ interpretation of their own labour experience in the call centre. This site was chosen because of its size and representation of the bigger South
African socio-political society. The study investigates what it means to work in the local government frontline. This thesis consists of nine chapters including an introduction and conclusion, in addition to conceptual, methodological and empirical sections.
Chapter 2 of this thesis looks at the literature pertaining to the call centre labour process and labour market conditions influencing the work organisation. It becomes very clear from the two dominant streams influenced by Braverman and Foucault that public sector call centres do not fit neatly into the two perspectives because of the limited attention to bureaucracy and the influence of political hierarchy in the public sector call centre. The main purpose of this chapter is to detail the labour market conditions that influence the call centre labour process generally and in particular in the developing world.
Chapter 3 of the thesis provides a theoretical framework built on the labour process debates inspired by Harry Braverman’s Labour and Monopoly Capital (1974) to provide a context for the understanding of the public sector service work. This chapter argues for the continued relevance of Harry Braverman’s thesis (degradation of work in the 21st century) within the state labour process. The insertion of resistance to his thesis by the later left scholars (Burawoy, Edwards, Friedman, Thompson) has distorted the purpose and objective of Labour and Monopoly Capital thesis. This insertion provided a gap to the postmodern (influenced by Michel Foucault) scholars for criticising Braverman about the ‘missing subject’. However, we see Foucault and Braverman complementing each other in explaining the objective and subjective aspects of work in the call centre labour process. Max Weber’s bureaucracy provides an additional tool in understanding the public sector work organisation. Braverman, Weber and Foucault help to explain the complex web of control and hierarchical mechanisms applicable in the state labour process.
Chapter 4 outlines the rationale behind the study and justification for the single case. This is done by looking at the literature pertaining to the methodology of qualitative study and the ethnography of call centre studies. The chapter also describes the study cite and participants, procedures and techniques used to collect and analyse data. Both the experience of the researcher and methods employed in the field are described to outline the limitations and challenges of the study.
Chapter 5 is intentionally situated between conceptual and empirical chapters and it introduces the City of Johannesburg’s socio-economic and political environment. In this chapter, the metaphor of the ‘(dis)connected city’ is used to describe the relations of the city with its workers, customers/citizens and community. This is the first chapter that introduces the views of the managers, officials, unions and activists regarding the changes introduced by the city through Egoli 2002’s neoliberal policy. The central aim of this chapter is to provide a broad overview of the City of Johannesburg, looking at the restructuring of the city since 2001. It is against this background that the city’s call centre was established in 2001, to centralise access to the city.
Chapter 6 describes in detail the physical environment of the call centre. The focus is on the work organisation and work relations within the call centre. Details on recruitment, training, the labour process and worker-manager relations help to create a picture of the internal dynamics of the call centre workplace. In this chapter the call centre composition and technological environment facilitating the nature of the call centre job is detailed to capture the nature of the call centre labour process in local government.
Chapter 7 of this thesis explores the workers’ subjective experiences of the conditions of work. This chapter draws a picture of the impact of challenges of working in the call centre on the workers’ lifestyles. It is these experiences that redefine the labour process in the public sector. The issues of safety, health, commitment and morale form the foundation of this chapter to establish the impact of customer experience on the worker’s subjective measures of their well-being.
Chapter 8 looks at the forms of resistance employed by the workers to counter the customer abuse and anger towards the local state. It combines the collective and individual forms of resistance. As part of the collective resistance, the South African Municipal Workers Union (SAMWU) is described along with Communication Workers Union to detail the challenges in this workspace. We explore the relationship between SAMWU and management, workers and their trade union. The implementation of Programme Phakama5
5 Phakama (means Rise in IsiZulu)- was a 5 year (2005-2010) plan aimed at developing and improving Revenue Management and Customer Interface Services in COJ. Phakama sought to create a single view of the customer and standardize customer interface throughout COJ practices by implemententing intergrated IT system to standardize customer service in COJ (COJ, 2007).
in COJ tended to produce wage disparities between the City and recently integrated call centre workers from the Utilities. This chapter looks at how the union deals with these challenges and illustrates broader South African Trade Union challenges manifested at the local level.
Chapter 9 summarises the key findings of the study with a specific focus on the conceptual contributions to the labour process studies of call centres. This chapter makes conclusions regarding the political mediation of bureaucracy and its influence in the call centre labour process within the public sector.
Chapter 2
Call Centre Labour Process and Labour Market Conditions
2.1 Introduction
This chapter looks at the labour market conditions facilitating call centre work. Both in South Africa and India, call centres are part of the strategies to absorb unemployed youth into the labour market. India has taken most of the offshore jobs, which is why South Africa tends to be compared to India. Beerepoot and Hendriks (2013: 825) have argued that the quality of call centre jobs should be evaluated based on the features of the local labour market and employment opportunities available. “Social relations of the labour process are connected to those of labour markets” (Peck, 1996: 25). This means the local labour market is expected to influence the labour process within the call centre industry. The labour market conditions can facilitate the nature and extent of call centre industry. Call centres have increasingly become a typical contemporary workplace within the service sector, providing opportunities and challenges to different audiences. They are also embraced for their massive employment opportunities by developing world governments as their
“footloose and global nature” seems to bring spatial division of labour to life (Massey, 1984). Offshoring has become one of the ways to save on labour costs through increased division of labour.
As they compress space and time through Information and Communication Technology, call centres provide a perfect setting in which to analyse interactive service work both locally and internationally. Taylor (2010: 252) cautioned us against “overemphasizing the technology as a driver. The widespread nature of call centre must take into account the political and economic environments of deregulation, organisational restructuring, financialisation and broader thrust of neoliberalism”. This means call centres have become central in the pursuit of cost efficiency and competitive advantage.
Garson’s (1988) description of call centres as “electronic sweatshops” has paved the way between two dominant sociological perspectives on call centres, one influenced by Braverman and other by Foucault. Call centres have been studied from different perspectives including Human Resources, Ergonomics, Geography, as part of the
information economy but most of the scholarly attention has come from the Labour process perspective, influenced by Braverman’s Labour and Monopoly Capital (1974). Taylor and Bain (1999) have been at the forefront of this perspective labelling these call centres
“assembly line on the head”. The call centre labour process facilitates 24-hour, seven-day a week customer service. Optimists, drawn mainly from new service management literature (Schneider and Bowen, 1999), have argued for the image of the more empowered, semi-professional, highly skilled and committed employees, delivering customised service. Most of these accounts are endorsed by management and business studies. Despite Taylor and Bain (1999) emphasising the variation of the call centres according to size, market orientation, and so forth, the pessimistic picture of the call centres has dominated the literature. The ‘production process’ is shaped by the surveillance system which controls the pace, quality and content of the work processes. It is hardly surprising that labour process theory has been mixed with Foucauldian discourse and sometimes used to decorate the titles that deal with the ‘subjective’ nature of call centre labour process.
Looking at the international literature on call centre labour process, I situate the public sector call centres within the customer model, promoted by neo-liberal policies. In this chapter, I divide the call centre labour process studies within two approaches, Marxist (influenced by Taylor and Bain) and Foucauldian (Fernie and MetCalf, 1998). The former is influenced by the Labour Process theory on control and resistance while the latter is based on supremacy of the surveillance discipline by Michel Foucault. In the end, I argue that this industry will provide another ‘black women’s factory’. This is not a coincidence as the labour market and social structures are mutually embedded given the social character of labour (Peck, 1996). This argument is developed against the backdrop of Kenny’s (2005) work on the retail industry and Cock’s (1989) work on domestic workers. Call centres join this service industry described by the authors to provide a cheap and insecure labour workforce mainly occupied by black women. The latter continue to occupy the secondary segment of the labour market in the post-apartheid workplace.