In 2010 a female employee at a Garanti Bank call centre in Istanbul had a conflict with management at her workplace. What caused the conflict is unclear, but in her account the industrial relations scholar Esin Gülsen (2015) suggests the employee was then isolated from her colleagues and barred from communicating with them. Managers cancelled her password for accessing the system, but still forced her to sit at her workstation each day without being able to do her job. Not long afterward she quit her position and eventually sued the company.
Workplace conflicts of this kind are hardly unusual, especially in call centres, but what happened next was remarkable. On the day the lawsuit was launched, call centre employees at Garanti began to receive a strange series of phone calls. Rather than the usual customers inquiring about the status of their chequing accounts, employees listened as one anonymous caller after another read a prepared message:
Good evening, I am calling you on behalf of the Association of Call Centre Workers. According to the information I obtained from the Association, a worker who worked in the same call centre with you today just had a hearing for a lawsuit that is ongoing against the bank for which you work.The bank imposed isolation upon this person for months and eventually forced her to resign. It did not allow her to talk to other people in the workplace. Other employees were warned not to communicate with her. She was forced to terminate her labour contract at the end of this process and then sued the bank.It seems that the managers of your call centre want to threaten you, prevent you from defending your rights and suppress you with this kind of behaviour.We, who support labour rights, are making this call to remind you that you are not alone. We know that your calls are being recorded and your managers will listen to these records. We do not expect you to answer right now.Please contact the Association of Call Center Workers for a collectively organized working life where your rights are secured and you get compensated fairly in return for your labor.1 (As cited in Gülsen, 2015, p. 144)
One employee noted that when the calls began to come in she was initially afraid and felt the need to hang up. Soon, however, workers at the call centre began to take their headphones off to discuss the calls among each other. Colleagues conversed across their workstations. As the day wore on, the Garanti call centre was so overrun by callers from the association that it could no longer receive calls from regular customers. The call centre had been shut down.
The example described by Gülsen offers a striking sketch of the contested and mutable social relations marking the relatively new and intensely communicative workplace that is the call centre. The dominant technological channels, communicative scripts, and labour processes engineered from above by management in the call centre had, in the short space of one afternoon, been suspended, reversed, and crowded out by incipient horizontal forms of communication developed from below. Instead of workers reading to customers from a text imposed by management, rank-and-file labour activists seized a direct channel for communication to their colleagues in order to read to them from an altogether different script—one that was both unsanctioned and subversive. Rather than call centre workers speaking to bank customers as they were paid to do, employees began to talk to each other about these strange phone calls and the lawsuit, bringing the labour conflict out into the open. Communication devoted to the production of profit came into open conflict with more horizontal forms of communication, ones that extended outward, among workers, and beyond the call centre walls.
A New Workforce
The events at the Garanti Bank underscore a critical transformation within capitalist economies and the rise of a newly communicative workforce. On the assembly line that dominated the Fordist factory, remarks the philosopher Paolo Virno, labour is silent (Virno, 2001). The soundtrack of a factory is the repetitive din of machines. As the economy has been transformed since the 1970s, however, Virno maintains, work has increasingly assumed the features of linguistic interaction. Communication has taken centre stage within post-Fordism, and labour now tends towards the production of intangibles, such as information, culture, services, or relationships.2 Once admitted only grudgingly in the site of production, the human faculty of language has now comprehensively been put to work.
This book uses Virno’s reflection on labour and language to describe the remarkable rise of the transnational call centre workforce and one of the fastest-growing and paradigmatic workspaces of our time. As a result of their steady meshing into the circuits of the global economy, the growth of call centres over the last quarter century has produced notable shifts in the composition of labour forces across geographic regions both distant and diverse. If the factory was once symbolic of work within industrialized countries, call centres have taken their place alongside service occupations such as retail employment, food service, cleaning work, and care giving as one of the more likely forms of employment for new generations of workers.
The figures are striking. At the end of the twentieth century, global employment in these workspaces was swelling by 20% a year and 100,000 jobs were being added every 12 months (Deery & Kinnie, 2004). By 2006, some 15,000 call centres had opened in Europe alone, fuelling the continent’s fastest-growing form of employment (Burgess & Connell, 2006; Huws & Paul, 2002). In the first decade of the twenty-first century, one out of every three new jobs in Ireland and the Netherlands was reported to be a call centre position, and in America over 4 million people, close to 3% of the working population, have been estimated to toil in one (Cugusi, 2005; Holman, Batt, & Holtgrewe, 2007). By 2010, call centre employment in the UK also stood at around 3% of the working population (or 950,000 people), and the industry had grown by 250% between 1995 and 2004 (Lloyd, 2013). In Canada, the most recent figures suggest that over half a million full- or part-time staff, or 3.4% of the working population makes a living in one of over 14,000 call centres in the country (Stevens, 2014, p. 59).
Employment growth has not been restricted to the Global North, as the call centre workforce has grown rapidly in Argentina, India, Barbados, South Africa, and many other countries. China has been estimated to have 400,000 workers employed in call centres (Qiu, 2010, p. 84). In the Philippines, 1.2 million people work in call centres, a sector which contributes 8% to the country’s gross domestic product (The Economist, 2016). What’s more, this form of workspace has been established in some of the most peripheral, seemingly disconnected areas of the global economy. Afghanistan, one of the most war-ravaged countries on earth, has a fledgling call centre sector supporting its own growing market for mobile phones: “Taleban call in and the women talk to them,” says Zermina, a manager at one of Kabul’s call centres, illustrating how the workplace has been translated into the most diverse settings, producing novel compositions of labour wherever it goes (as cited in Doucet, 2007).
This book explores the formation of a new workforce attached to capitalism’s expanding communicative requirements. Picking up on the portrait of contemporary labour offered by Virno and other theorists of post-operaismo (in English, post-workerism, or autonomist Marxism), I describe this process as one in which language is put to work in the call centre.3 The concept of language put to work designates capital’s valourization of the human capacity to communicate through language. As a necessary precondition for this process of valourization, language put to work also references the production of an informational underclass whose purpose is to satisfy the economy’s growing dependence on connectivity and communicative exchange with consumers. Borrowing a term from labour researcher Ursula Huws, I see this gendered and racialized class of workers as one part of an emerging and diverse cybertariat (Brophy & de Peuter, 2015; Huws, 2003).
While Virno’s discussion could be taken to imply a sharp break between the characteristics of labour and value production characterizing Fordism and post-Fordism, the proliferation of call centres in the last quarter century also highlights the uncanny persistence of a world of work we are regularly told is a part of our past rather than our present. This book argues that forms of info-service work such as call centre employment create fatal problems for facile accounts of the end of the factory, the end of Taylorism, the end of disciplined and repetitive labour, the end of exploitation, the end of class, and other prematurely eulogized traits of Fordist capitalism. As a group of call centre workers in Calabria, Italy, put it, the story of call centres is one of new social subjects and also of old forms of exploitation (Cuccomarino & Pezzulli, 2012). The process of language put to work is one in which the working class is being reconstituted in a manner that draws on the inherent communicative and relational capacities of populations across the planet.
As Virno’s description of the contemporary relationship between labour and communication suggests, the first quality one is struck by when entering a call centre is the unbroken hum and buzz of conversation, of talk and affective connection. Despite long-standing and regularly refreshed predictions regarding the growth of highly skilled, upwardly mobile and intrinsically rewarding “knowledge work,” however, the submission of language to the production of value in call centres tends to see the human capacity for relationality reduced to a limited set of allowable utterances, statements, and responses, all of them tailored towards the maximization of communicative productivity.
As Deborah Cameron (2008) has found, the communication produced in call centres tends to conform to what she calls “top-down talk,” or interaction that is designed not by the participants themselves but by “superordinate agents” such as consultants or managers. A group of labour activists (Friends of Kolinko & Gurgaon Workers News, 2012) describes this communication as consisting “basically of industrialised mouth movements and Taylorised emotions,” generating what Arlie Hochschild (2004, p. 5) called the “unexpected common ground” between the nineteenth-century factory and the twenty-first-century service sector.
Incorporating these insights and drawing on work by the post-workerist theorist Gigi Roggero (2011), I suggest that one of the call centre’s defining features is that it tends to be geared towards the production of what we could call abstract communication, or communication that is instrumental, homogeneous, measurable, and thereby divorced from the concrete knowledge, abilities, or experience of those who enact it.4 In this respect, call centres are important workplaces to examine not only because of their prevalence but because the labour relations that characterize them are a potent counter-example to recurring narratives of liberated knowledge workers, friction-free capitalism, and the growing creativity of labour (Drucker, 1996; Florida, 2002; Gates, Myhrvold, & Rinearson, 1996).
As the story that introduced this book suggest...