Winter 2020

EXCERPT - One Ringy-dingy, Two Ringy-dingy, No More Ringy-dingy?

Written by Debbie J. Goldman

From Disconnected: Call Center Workers Fight for Good Jobs in the Digital Age - University of Illinois Press, 2024

Victoria Kintzer sat at her desk in the Bell of Pennsylvania residential business office in 1980, heard the ring of the black rotary-dial telephone on her desk, and before it could ring again, she picked up the receiver. The customer wanted to place an order for telephone service and also had a question about her bill. Kintzer looked for the customer’s record in the file cabinet next to her desk. The file cabinet, known as a tub, contained all the records of customers in the local telephone exchange for which she was responsible. If the customer lived in a nearby exchange, Kintzer got up to get the record from a coworker’s tub, stopping for a moment to chat, and then returned to her desk to assist the customer. She wrote up the customer’s request and put her notes in the outbox for the service order writer to type up for distribution to the proper department. Although her supervisor listened in on some of her calls to ensure conformance with the detailed Bell system methods and procedures, and she resented the rules that made her raise her hand to go to the bathroom, Kintzer had relative autonomy to use her skills, knowledge, and emotional intelligence to assist her customers. She took satisfaction in helping them, solving problems, and making sure the job was done right from start to finish. She knew that she could turn to her union if she had problems on the job. This was the work life of the Bell telephone service representative in the monopoly era in the 1970s and early 1980s, before the introduction of digital technologies and market forces drove change in the customer service operations.

Fast forward to 1994. Kintzer still worked for Bell of Pennsylvania, but her job as a service representative had changed dramatically. It was a decade since the 1984 breakup of the Bell system that accelerated market competition in the telecommunications industry. Kintzer now sat in a cubicle with shoulder-high dividers separating her from her coworkers. She trained her eyes on her computer, with the automatic call distributor dropping one call after another into her headset, with no time between calls. She had no opportunity to get up, walk around, or converse briefly with her coworkers. She took only sales calls; the automated system sent billing inquiries to a different call queue staffed by lower-paid collections representatives. The job had become quite complex, with various rates for different geographic areas, multiple products and services, and data entry and retrieval from several software systems. Kintzer entered her service orders directly into the computer, frequently overlapping this task as she took the next call. Electronic scripts guided her through conversations with customers, designed to upsell additional products and services. Digital software tracked her every move in real time—how long she took on each call, the time between calls, adherence to her daily schedule, sales performance, the manner in which she moved through her scripts and databases, and even how many keystrokes she took to perform a task. Supervisors evaluated her performance on all these measures and imposed discipline for failure to meet sales quotas and time measurement benchmarks. As a local union leader, Kintzer faced challenges protecting her members from the intensified monitoring, sales pressures, work speed-up, and reclassified lower-wage job titles. This was the work life of the service representatives in the Bell telephone companies in an era of increased competition and fully automated workplace management systems.

Within the space of a decade, Bell of Pennsylvania, along with the other legacy Bell system companies, had revolutionized the work life of tens of thousands of service representatives employed in the customer care call centers. As corporate executives transformed their businesses from monopoly-era regulated public service organizations with guaranteed rates of return to competitive enterprises in pursuit of ever-higher profits, the managers of the customer service operations struggled to reduce costs and boost revenues while still providing high-quality service. These managers turned to Bell system engineers, programmers, and outside vendors to enhance the digital technologies that distributed the calls to the service representatives. They adopted sophisticated workforce management tools that enabled them to intensify control and surveillance over the pace and manner in which the frontline customer service representatives did their work. The resulting work organization of high demand with little control was a recipe for debilitating and demoralizing stress on the job.

How did the call center workers—and their union—wrestle with management over the degradation of working conditions and downward pressure on living standards in the call centers? And how successful were they in their struggles for good, humane jobs in the highly automated service centers? Disconnected addresses these questions through a historical study of a predominantly female customer service labor force at two legacy Bell companies, AT&T and Bell Atlantic (now called Verizon). The service representatives coalesced into a workforce of resistance in response to the degrading, stressful conditions in their call centers. I use the term “workforce of resistance” to emphasize collective action, rather than individual acts of sabotage or subterfuge. The service representatives mobilized as an occupational group to pressure their union, the Communications Workers of America (CWA), to fight on their behalf for humane, safe, secure, well-paying jobs. Their collective resistance took many forms and used multiple strategies. But whether through collective bargaining, contract enforcement, union-management joint projects, strike action, or organizing, their fight for greater control at work and for compensation commensurate with the value they created for their employers represented acts of resistance.

Their struggle for good jobs faced many challenges. The very forces driving change in their call centers—the introduction of new digital technologies, the intensification of market competition facilitated by those technologies, neoliberal regulatory policies, the financial turn in capitalism and corporate governance, and the decline of unions—also narrowed the terrain on which these workers struggled with management to shape their conditions at work. The customer service workers served as the shock troops on the frontlines of this tumultuous transition, and they often felt like cannon fodder.

Disconnected argues that while new technology deployment enables the reconfiguration of the economic terrain, it is human beings, with competing interests, resources, and power, who make the decisions about how to deploy technology and which institutional structures will frame the social impact of those technologies. The decisions are social and political choices, with outcomes determined by political struggles between management and labor, shaped by the institutional structures of the political economy in which they take place. As Karl Marx wrote, “People make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given, and transmitted from the past.”

In their battles with management, the AT&T and Bell Atlantic customer service workers had one important resource that most U.S. call center workers, indeed most service-sector employees, do not have: they were represented by a union. The CWA had a mature bargaining relationship with the Bell companies dating back to the post–World War II period, giving them a vehicle for collective resistance not available to most call center employees. To be sure, individual call center workers have some degree of agency in pushing back against conditions in the digital workplace—they can game the system, they can quit—but without organization, they have limited power to influence fundamental issues of work organization, technology deployment, job security, and compensation.

The CWA-represented customer service workers struggled for power not only with their employers but also within their union. Although militant women operators built CWA, the male technicians were the dominant force within the union by the 1960s. With automated equipment gradually decimating the operator workforce, and competition elevating the size and strategic importance of the customer sales and service operation, the service representatives emerged as the female work group fighting for greater voice within the union. While the female-led customer service bargaining units excelled at crafting local solutions to workplace problems and developing strong leaders, they needed to mobilize the full power of their diversified union to make significant progress on their issues. This was a formidable task, but when successful, as during the Verizon strike in the year 2000, that unity proved critical to winning a pathbreaking stress relief package after eighteen days on the picket lines.

The gender division of labor is prominent in the call center environment, as it is in other “caring” professions. Women make up the vast majority of nurses, home care workers, flight attendants, clerical workers, wait staff, retail clerks, social workers, and elementary and high school teachers. Their daily work requires what scholar Arlie Hochschild identifies as emotional labor. Emotional labor is hard work, though frequently underappreciated and underpaid. Emotional labor can be deeply satisfying, but it can also be enormously frustrating and stressful, particularly when emotional laborers do not receive the autonomy, respect, compensation, and conditions at work that allow them to provide good service to patients, students, clients, and customers. The Bell system call center workers attempted to use customer relationships and an emphasis on high-quality service as sources of power and solidarity, but the machine-paced, highly scripted, and heavily monitored call center environment imposed limitations on these strategies, as did management focus on cost cutting over service quality. Moreover, forging labor-consumer alliances proved difficult as consumer advocates as well as policymakers prioritized competition and regulatory policies designed to lower consumer prices. This drove a race to the bottom in labor standards and customer service, as the unionized Bell companies strove to compete with the lower-wage, anti-union new entrants into the telecommunications market. An unintended consequence of consumer advocates’ and regulators’ laser focus on price competition, then, was deteriorating customer service, which has continued to this day as unionized call centers compete with a low-wage, high turnover, nonunion, and increasingly offshore workforce.

An estimated 3.7 million workers in the United States are employed in almost 40,000 domestic call centers, representing about 2 percent of the U.S. workforce. More U.S. workers are employed in call centers than in the manufacture of automobiles, airplanes, machinery, and steel combined.. The global call center industry employs millions more. In 2022, the four largest worldwide call center companies employed almost 1 million workers in more than 900 global call centers.

The Bell system provides an excellent case study to unravel the multiple forces driving change and setting the bounds for organized worker resistance in the automated customer service workplaces. Two distinct regulatory events accelerated market competition in telecommunications markets. The 1984 AT&T divestiture broke up the integrated Bell system monopoly. Bell system employees who weathered the 1984 dissolution of the AT&T monopoly talk about work life “before” and “after” divestiture. “Before” were the good old days; “after” included massive job cuts, insecurity, weakening of union power, and declining customer service. Twelve years after divestiture, Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which opened all telecommunications markets to competition and accelerated a dizzying wave of mergers, acquisitions, and cost-cutting pressures, including outsourcing of call center work. These two government policy changes serve as markers for transformation in market structure and competitive conditions, which, in turn, shifted the terrain on which the union and management contested for control. Union representation in the telecommunications industry declined during this period from about 60 percent in the early 1980s to 22 percent in 2005, the concluding year of this study. Today it stands at just under 10 percent.

The call center workers waged their battles during a period of weakening union power in the United States. Union representation in the United States has dropped to just under 7 percent of the private-sector workforce. Unions are essential to give call center workers, and all working people, a collective voice to counter the power of capital in the workplace and in the larger society. Government policy is critical in structuring the labor market institutions and industrial relations systems within which unions contest for power. The U.S. industrial relations system, with its decentralized enterprise-based bargaining structures, provides few, if any, formal avenues for union participation in key management decisions regarding technology deployment and work organization.    

The union won important victories for its members: curbing secret supervisory monitoring, limiting discipline for failure to meet sales quotas and time measurement benchmarks, raising service representatives’ wages, fighting the functionalization and downgrading of non-sales positions, bringing back outsourced work, and gaining access to jobs selling and serving the internet (and at AT&T, wireless). But the union and its customer service members faced formidable challenges as their employers reorganized their businesses many times over to compete against nonunion companies with lower labor costs and more favorable regulatory treatment, while at the same time meeting the demands of capital owners to deliver ever-higher returns on their investments. Weak U.S. labor laws provided little assistance to nonunion workers when they faced aggressive employers seeking to block their campaigns for union representation. The contests of this pivotal unionized workforce, operating in one of the most dynamic and important sectors of the U.S. and global economy, highlight the opportunities, challenges, and constraints U.S. service workers face in their struggles for power in the post-industrial service economy.

The digital transformation affects virtually every workplace today. From the Amazon warehouses, to UPS drivers, from tightly scheduled railroad workers to post-COVID white collar work-at-home professionals, employers deploy the vast capabilities of information technology to regulate, track, and control the pace and the manner in which employees do their jobs.[i] These electronic systems give employers tools that Frederick W. Taylor only dreamed of when he pioneered his system of scientific management in the factories of the early twentieth century. Not only do they give management the ability to control workers’ time and the labor process far beyond the machine pacing of the assembly line, but they also enable employers to break up internal labor markets and to outsource production and service functions to third parties around the globe. In the call center, automated systems add a third dimension, as they mediate the interaction between workers and customers. The same digital technologies that employers use to control the labor process, technology companies use to track and monetize our lives as we move through websites, emails, texts, and social media posts. This study of the ways organized workers mobilized to resist dehumanizing labor in digital workplaces, and the constraints they encountered in the context of a neoliberal political economy that provides few public-policy guardrails against the ravages of financial capitalism, has wider implications as we reexamine the regulatory regime that has made this possible.  

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