Are still very much with us. Here’s a chart showing the average staff turnover in British call centres (from here). Turnover marches up in the boom, crashes in the recession, and you can even make out the doubledip. All clear so far?
Read More The political aspects of full employmentI have, from time to time, disagreed violently with Jonathan Freedland, notably about his habit of showing up at Labour Party candidate selection meetings and trying to impose conditions on the strength of his position as Mr Big Stuff, Acting, Unpaid, and then smearing the candidate as an anti-semite the week before the election in…
Read More If you think you’re in a bullshit job, you may end up with more bullshitShorter me: economists should study business more, and in an ideal world, industrial sociology, before they try to do cognitive psychology Peter Dorman at Econospeak takes issue with a Robert Frank piece about workplace safety, which has all the whoopee doo Econ-101 problems you’d expect. I think, though, that there is a really big issue…
Read More This one weird trick will improve your productivity and deliver social justiceTony Harrison, reviewed by Nicholas Lezard: he says “When dole-wallahs fuck off to the void / what’ll t’mason carve up for their jobs? / The cunts who lieth ‘ere wor unemployed?” That hasn’t changed, not really: and “call-centre worker” isn’t something you’d want on your gravestone either, as my own experience has taught me Here’s…
Read More Some Yorkshire linksSo we’ve looked at how they’re dreadful and why. The stakes are important; a huge chunk of the economy is made up of services, and some of the places where they are located are becoming almost as much one-industry towns as they were before their one industry shut down. What if this sector was as…
Read More Politics of call centres, part three (really part three this time)So, why did we get here? Back in the mists of time, in the US Bell System, there used to be something called a Business Office, by contrast to a Central Office (i.e. what we call a BT Local Exchange in the UK), whose features and functions were set down in numerous Bell System Practice…
Read More The politics of call centres, part two: sources of failureWhat is it that makes call centres so uniquely awful as social institutions? This is something I’ve often touched on at Telco 2.0, and also something that’s been unusually salient in my life recently – I moved house, and therefore had to interact with getting on for a dozen of the things, several repeatedly. (Vodafone…
Read More The politics of call centres, part one