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Your call is important to us: in the early 1990s, call centres were hailed as a saviour for communities hit hard by the re-structuring of the manufacturing sector throughout the 1980s. Nicky Welch talks to workers in Bendigo's call centres about the reality.

Article Excerpt
Imagine you are working as an in-bound call centre representative for a large telecommunications company. Your workplace was once a supermarket and has been converted into a 300-seat call centre. You are in a space of one metre square, in a pod of 12 co-workers, turned away 90 degrees from your mate next to you. You can feel the headset digging in above your ear. The noise buzzes around you, in each corner of the office the television is on and a radio station is piped through speakers above your head. The fluorescent lights give the office a glow.

All around you people are murmuring into their headsets, speaking to customers, taking one of up to 80 calls for the day, assisting people with their phone bills and selling them new landline and internet packages. A flashing red LED display tells you how many callers are on hold and how many minutes they have been waiting for. Your computer logs every single call and you can get an update every half hour to see if you've kept your calls under the required six minutes and made enough sales to be on target for a monthly bonus.

You need to be in the zone today, last week you got an email from your team leader saying she'd had a call from head office to ask why you were spending so long on calls. They've been talking a lot lately about outsourcing some of the work to India, and low performers will be the first to lose their jobs if that happens, so you need to concentrate.

You just wish callers would learn to behave better, they have such high expectations of gold star service and they often abuse you for not being able to help, or for keeping them waiting too long. They don't understand that privacy legislation means you cannot, under any circumstances, help them if they are not named on the bill, even if it is in their partner's name and have been paying the bill for years. You are sick of being sworn at when you try to sell them something, but, as management keeps telling you, unless you sell you are out of a job.

A call drops into your headset, it is the fifty-first for today. No time for dreaming, it is straight into 'Welcome to Telco, how may we help?'

Welcome to world of the call centre representative.

Bendigo Calling

In the early 1990s, jobs in the call centre industry were held out as the lifeline for workers made redundant from the restructuring of the manufacturing sector in the 1980s, especially in regional Australian cities. Bendigo's experience was typical. As manufacturing businesses closed in the late 1980s Bendigo was hit with very high rates of unemployment throughout the 1990s, peaking at 14.2 per cent. In addition to job losses, declining industry in Bendigo ensured little local tax revenue and widespread empty business real estate.

The City of Greater Bendigo was anxious to secure the capital investment of companies to create jobs and utilise real estate. An obvious target was the telephone call centre industry. Call-centre work tends to be stressful and offers few opportunities for career advancement, producing a combination of low productivity amongst workers and...

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