Call centres: keeping costs down, but who pays?
 

Imogen Bertin,  Cork Teleworking		By nature, call centre work is portable because calls can be relocated to a new centre very quickly by reprogramming the ‘switch’ that delivers calls to agents. As if to underline this, an online market in outsource contracts can be seen in action at the Forum section of www.callcentre.co.uk.[1] This is the theme that runs throughout the EMERGENCE project, of the butterfly being able to alight where it will, but only temporarily: it’s all about cost. The advantage, some may feel, lies with the technology and the employers, rather than with the workers. The risk of poor working conditions, and workers being taken advantage of, or being seen as being expendable, is often there.

The TOSCA project, funded by the European Commission’s IST programme, has been looking at working conditions in European call centres to examine call centre working conditions, and its results are published on the TOSCA website. The TOSCA partners carried out a basic inventory of 531 European call centres, looking at issues such as the type of work carried out, the technology in use, the languages available, the opening hours and the availability of staff representation. This inventory was used to identify themes for a number of more detailed case studies.

The TOSCA sample was not random or Europe-wide and is under-represented in terms of in-house call centres, as these are difficult to locate. However, the sample is large enough for some general trends to be visible. Centres reporting higher levels of outsourcing activity tend to be in those countries where the call centre market is less developed (Belgium, Spain, Italy), and to be independently owned. In contrast, the more developed markets such as Ireland and the UK tended to show fewer outsourcing centres, larger centre size and a higher level of technology use, with greater prevalence of ICT links between centres.

Opening hours tended to be longer in the more mature markets. French centres have the shortest average opening hours and UK centres the longest, while only one-fifth of Italian centres and one-sixth of Spanish centres were open 24/7. Overall, about two-thirds of call centre agents are women, and most staff are under 30. Despite this demographic profile, there is very little atypical work available. There are few temporary workers or agency workers, and less than ten per cent of call centre agents work part time.

The detailed report of the case studies will be published shortly. However, some interesting points from the Irish case studies can be listed here. Call centre agents reported problems with the following:

• shift working, especially short notice of changes

• problems with ventilation and temperature in centres

• staff required to work the public holidays of the country markets they serve rather than Irish bank holidays

• favouritism and an ‘us and them’ mentality between management and staff.

• pay levels lower (around 5,000 euros per year) than for staff carrying out similar tasks in a conventional, non-call centre environment

• pay ‘ceilings’ that force experienced staff to leave and be replaced by new recruits, thus keeping wage bills static

• lack of continuing training – most staff just receive induction training lasting 2-3 weeks

• problems with security in car parks for shift workers

• problems with public transport access to centres

• staff often unaware of health and safety procedures and unaware of the identity of their health and safety representative.

Chris Hudson is organizing officer for the Communications Workers Union, the Irish partner in the Tosca project. He describes some of the problems of organizing call centre workers:

‘This is a transient workforce: agents typically turn over after 6-12 months, while team leaders last about 18 months to two years. There are also many young, foreign workers who do not know their employment rights. Unions often get involved in actions to improve conditions without any large increase in membership. Management, on the other hand, has a captive audience where they can identify union members easily and make life difficult for them. Just carrying out these case studies was as difficult as pulling teeth because agents and team leaders were nervous about giving their views for fear of management victimization.’

Michael Bride of the Irish Banking Officials Association has drafted a charter of call centre workers’ rights. He says examples of multinational outsourcing are already to be found in Ireland:

‘GE Capital has already outsourced some work to India, and there were clear implications during recent negotiations at one large banking call centre in Ireland that globalization is a threat to an “expensive” Irish workforce. The financial sector employers were arguing for pay comparison with other call centres, rather than with other banking establishments, in order to reduce costs.’

Changes in technology may also herald the end of the pan-European call centres that Ireland has been so successful in attracting in the past. As centres move towards handling fax, email and text messages in addition to voice contacts, there is a greater requirement for written language proficiency, which is much harder to find than verbal fluency. Pan-European centres are already reporting skill shortages for some languages when they try to service the whole continent from one location, such as Dublin. IT developments allow call centre functions to be located on a remote host so that agents just need a PC with a web browser, and a dedicated high-speed line to function. Telephone switching developments allow sophisticated flows of calls from one centre to another to cope with demand peaks. These changes are making networks of regionally based centres an effective alternative to the pan-European centres.

1. The online magazine Site Selection also has an interesting article about the attraction of different geographical locations.