Abstract
In 2002, I started working as coordinator of the September 11 hotline for the city of New York. The creation of the hotline was an almost immediate response to the crisis and was established to provide the city’s residents with emotional support and up-to-date information about available services and benefits. It remained active for four years. Although providing an invaluable resource, the work was also incredibly difficult, as is any hotline or call center work. Calls arrive, without end, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The calls are repetitive, often to the point of stultification, yet callers to hotlines are individuals with very real problems that need to be addressed. Still, hotline workers are often decidedly limited in their ability to offer solutions. Working with management-approved scripts, while being monitored and required to master proprietary data-entry systems, workers are often under great pressure to answer calls efficiently and effectively and to strike the appropriate tone in response to the caller. The telephone is a rather limited technology for conveying concern: it delimits human interaction to the voice, to inflection, and to language. As a result, hotline workers must become relatively sophisticated performers, managing and modulating their own experience and emotions to work “appropriately,” and, as one might expect, such performance takes a vicious toll on one’s body and one’s psyche. Answering calls at a hotline, even under the best conditions, is simply exhausting and debilitating work. It is the antithesis of healthy labor conditions.
Yet, as Enda Brophy’s book Language Put to Work: The Making of the Global Call Centre Workforce documents, the call center has become the overlooked and taken-for-granted sine qua non of global, corporate capitalism. It represents what Brophy calls “a distinct and dominant model for the reorganization from above of customer service.” By one standard, such reorganization has been quite successful, as call center work is currently one of the fastest growing workforces across both the global North and South. As Brophy notes, the growth of this relatively obscured labor force has taken place in such wide-ranging locations as New Brunswick, Canada—where one out of every fifteen working individuals was employed in a call center in 2000—to the Philippines, where approximately 1.2 million people currently work in the industry. Brophy says, “The proliferation of call centres in the last quarter century . . . highlights the uncanny persistence of a world of work that we are regularly told is part of our past rather than our present.” Furthermore, call centers have been particularly adept at drawing educated, and often bilingual, workers into an industry that has been described as a “digital assembly line,” raising serious questions about the nature of mobility in this particular world of work.
Language Put to Work is a close inquiry into the nature of this digital assembly line, its implications for workers, and the possibilities for organized labor. But it is also a book that details the development of an economy dependent on such specifically skilled, communicative, exploitable, and managed workers. As Brophy suggests, the work itself is a form of punishment for workers, a degraded and standardized form of customer service that can push individuals to their cognitive and physical limits. Yet, the very model of the call center as an outsourced, or “offshored,” to use Brophy’s term, servile labor pool represents a break with earlier forms of work organization and is, Brophy writes, the result of attacks on office workers who refused the deterioration of their working conditions as well as the result of corporations attempting to free themselves from the demands of unionized labor. As Brophy suggests, the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism, toward an informational, “communicative” capitalism, has been built on the proletarianization of service labor.
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 a generation of workers.
In the call center, workers not only perform the service of interacting with and managing the complaints of clients and customers, they also “care” for the corporate brand or corporate reputation through that relational work. Despite being offshored and obscured, these workers are central to the maintenance of corporate profits.
If we were to map the transnational call center, we would see a global nervous system of modern industry, as it has sought to restructure itself for a so-called new economy that places value on customer “experience” and interaction. Nothing encapsulates the imperative of the new economy better than the phrase “contact us,” writes Brophy, which encourages both a communicative and engaging customer and the sense that the corporation itself can speak and can be communicated with. Such an interactive economy requires the presence, then, of a very specific type of communicative worker who is not only capable of withstanding repeated contact but who can consistently provide the appropriate response and work to develop a relationship with the customer, without fail, via specific technology. This is highly skilled emotional work—yet a fundamental contradiction in the call center is that such work has also been highly amenable to routinization, measurement, and control.
Language in the call center is scripted, managed, surveilled, timed, and measured, all in the service of tightly controlling how such customer interactions take place. Brophy coins the helpful term “abstract communication” to suggest that the organization of work in the call center modulates language away from a personal and subjective experience and into “instrumental” language, “divorced from the concrete knowledge, abilities, or experiences of those who enact it.” The call center, then, is a far cry from the “new” economy vision of liberated knowledge workers or denizens of the creative economy. Rather, a fundamental argument of Language Put to Work is that such standardization of human experience is fundamental to the business model of “communicative” capitalism. Language must be put to work, but in very specific, highly managed, measured, and exploitable forms.
One of the most interesting insights of Language Put to Work is that we are all in training for this type of work. Workers in centers tend to be highly educated, multilingual individuals whose linguistic and cognitive abilities make them ideal service workers. Communicative capitalism requires a competent, speaking subject, precisely to exploit the capacities of that subject.
Although conditions in call centers limit worker expression—as well as their physical movement—and there is little autonomy to be found, Brophy suggests these workplaces are also replete with forms of worker resistance and refusal. The book is woven from interviews with workers, tacking closely to their experiences and accounts. From learning to steal time by pausing calls to quitting to organizing formal campaigns, workers are waging dynamic and ongoing battles within call centers. Despite capitalism’s imperative to subsume life into the labor process fully, there are always struggles and tensions to be exploited. For example, the book opens with a vignette of activists in Istanbul who covertly used the call center phone lines to help organize workers on the behalf of the Association of Call Center Workers. The episode illustrates not only the presence of formal organizing but also the cracks in the facade of the full rationalization of the labor process. Not only are workers organizable, but the technology can be turned against itself, such as we have begun to see in some recent gig-economy strikes where workers have used the digital platform itself to organize a strike.
Language Put to Work should be read by anyone who has an interest in understanding the future of work, which, despite current rhetoric about robots and full automation, will most likely look more like call center labor: highly managed, routinized, and entangled in various proprietary technologies and data-hungry software systems—yet also irreducibly human. Brophy is careful to point out that the organizing he finds among transnational call centers should not be seen as a harbinger of a global, digital labor movement; it is hard not to think of other workers, such as commercial content moderators or microworkers, or to link Brophy’s insights about the persistence of resistance more broadly to the spread of a digital economy overly comfortable with flexibility, on-demand labor, and limited worker protection. Although we are beginning to see organization and agitation among some gig-economy workers, we need more research in the vein of Language Put to Work, which can link spontaneous and organized forms of resistance.
Furthermore, a key strength of the book is its ability to tease out what is old and what is new in the call center. Although the call center may represent a break with previous forms of work organization, it is also a space where rather old forms of Taylorism take on new life and where managerial logics find new truck in the digital workplace—this time attempting to capture elements of human experience we once thought might be immune to measurement. Beyond these techniques, however, call centers also forge new geographies, linking the histories of Fordism with new forms of “virtual migration.” As Brophy writes, the “call centre is immediately global in scope,” and it has found success exporting its model of labor organization across the world. As Brophy suggests, a dual move occurred in the late 1990s and 2000s, which pulled consumers online while workers were pushed offshore. As such, the call center sits at the heart of a reorganized set of logistics and supply chains, illustrating how human labor is still fundamental to the coordination of goods and services—but also how that labor must continually be trained, managed, and constrained, coming as close to automated as possible.
Indeed, a key argument of Language Put to Work is that the communicative, informational, digital economy requires the formation of what Brophy, borrowing from digital-economy expert Ursula Huws, calls a “cyberproletariat”, or a growing informational underclass—a class of workers whose material practices enable the seemingly “immaterial” economy to function. There is no full automation without hidden forms of human labor. As Brophy stresses throughout Language Put to Work, the process of creating a “cyberproletariat” is a contested and open-ended process. This history has not been written but rather is being lived and fought out in ongoing struggles.
Brophy ends his book with a reimagining of what the call center can or could be. Although some dream of fully automated customer service, Brophy takes another path: returning workplaces to workers. Such a move would not free call centers from the demands of the market, but it opens up other possibilities. Call centers, owned and operated by those who work there, could be reimagined for a range of progressive ends such as support for health care, mental health care, housing, or education. The idea of “communication without management” opens our imagination to a world not reduced to automation but to one organized to meet human needs in a more sustainable and humane way.
Given my own experience with hotline work, I have some doubts about whether this work can be redeemed. But this work is proliferating, and we should inquire into possible routes to restoring worker autonomy and investing in new models of worker ownership, cooperation, and organization. If the call center is the ideal case study for the degradation of immaterial labor, it should also be a useful site for truly understanding how to dismantle a system so dependent on the production of misery.