Book Review: How Telecom Customer Service Reps Got Better Connected Via Their Union

American politicians love to pose as defenders of factory workers threatened by globalization, corporate restructuring, and overseas outsourcing. But their campaign spiels rarely mention other jobs at risk, for the same reasons, in white-collar workplaces that now employ more workers than all domestic manufacturers of steel, autos, airplanes, and other machinery combined.

Among them are the nearly 4 million employees of 40,000 call centers based in the U.S., part of a labor force that rapidly expanded in the last 40 years due to changes in the way people buy products and get service and support.

As a result, writes Debbie Goldman in her valuable new book Disconnected: Call Center Workers Fight for Good Jobs in the Digital Age, “Call centers became the primary vehicle through which businesses (and many public agencies) interact with customers, clients, and citizens.” They now employ 17 million people in a global industry that offers employers the opportunities to move work from higher labor cost countries to ones with lower-wage scales and “electronic sweatshop” conditions.

Goldman is a former research director for the Communications Workers. During her three decades at union headquarters, she helped CWA customer services reps negotiate with AT&T and Bell Atlantic (now Verizon).

As she recounts in Disconnected, she also helped nurture a network of rank-and-file activists who gathered annually to discuss workplace problems and solutions involving telecom’s fastest growing occupational group.

ALTERNATIVE VISION

Collectively, they developed and tried to promote an alternative vision for customer service jobs, pushing for an “environment that valued their judgment, experience, and professional skills.” This would require drastic changes in working conditions in call center work, which is characterized by computer-paced work, remote monitoring by supervisors, sales pressure, and scripted interaction with customers. All these pressures make for a stressful work environment leading to illness, absence, and high turnover, even in unionized workplaces.

The mostly female customer service reps initially faced some pushback in a union where predominantly male technicians had more sway. The author describes the mobilization by service rep-led locals to pressure the national union to fight on their behalf, and to build effective cross-border campaigns in solidarity with call center workers abroad.

Shrinking union density in telecom was a bigger problem for CWA members, regardless of their job. AT&T, a regulated monopoly, once employed 700,000 union members. But it was broken up in 1984, leading to the rapid growth of aggressive anti-union competitors.

As the author notes, union representation declined in telecom from 60 percent to 22 percent from 1980 to 2005. Now it’s down to 10 percent, despite vigorous CWA organizing efforts. The 110,000 CWA members who remain in telecom work work in a mix of technical, sales, and service rep jobs at AT&T, Verizon, Frontier, and CenturyLink/Qwest.

Seventeen thousand of them at AT&T, including call center staff in nine southeastern states, approved a new contract this month after a four-week walkout, the longest telecom strike in the region’s history. Another 8,500 AT&T workers in California and Nevada also ratified a new agreement after rejecting the company’s previous offer.

Disconnected includes a detailed case study of a three-week strike nearly 25 years ago, by 85,000 Verizon workers from Maine to Virginia. It focused on job security protections, organizing rights at the company’s fast-growing wireless subsidiary, and winning what the author calls “a path breaking stress-relief package for customer service reps.” Thanks to extensive membership mobilization, call center workers secured new contract language that “curbed the most abusive speed up, management surveillance, mandatory overtime, and contracting out of their work.”

However Goldman writes that fundamental decisions about work organization, and new automated systems, remained under management control. What CWA hoped would be an organizing rights breakthrough at largely non-union Verizon Wireless (VZW) was soon nullified. After the 2000 strike, VZW closed all the wireless call centers covered by its new card-check and neutrality deal with CWA, and shifted that work elsewhere in the country.

CHALLENGING ORGANIZING ENVIRONMENT

A quarter century later, only a handful of Verizon Wireless techs and retail store workers have bargaining rights, despite valiant ongoing efforts to recruit more of them, along with call center reps and VZW’s even harder to reach “home-based associates.”

The organizing environment is even more challenging for T-Mobile Workers United, a CWA-backed network of call center workers, techs, and salespeople at T-Mobile US and MetroPCS. For comparison, during one 2005-6, twenty thousand new CWA members were recruited at Cingular, the wireless carrier now known as AT&T Mobility.

That’s because the union was able to use its bargaining leverage with the parent company to win a card check and neutrality agreement to avoid contested NLRB elections. Call center managers were barred from interfering with committee-building and card-signing, which enabled call center workers in places like Jackson, Mississippi to self-organize, free of the usual union busting campaigns.

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Some of CWA’s subsequent call center campaigns have also been centered in southern states but outside of telecom. In 2014, after a 19-year struggle, CWA helped passenger service workers at American Airlines organize a unit that included nearly 15,000 workers, following American’s merger with US Airways, whose customer service agents were union.

A similar protracted struggle is now underway at Maximus, a federal contractor, which employs 10,000 customer service staff to assist recipients of Medicare and Affordable Care Act coverage. In a workforce predominantly composed of Black and Latina women, many employed in right-to-work states, there have been six strikes in the last two years over low pay, heavy workloads, lack of job security, and affordable healthcare. Their “long, bruising fight” has been aided by nearby CWA locals with telecom call center members. The campaign also draws on the lessons of past skirmishes with federal call center contractors, like AT&T.

‘THEIR QUALITY OR OURS?’

Overall, Goldman’s account of CWA’s late 20th century search for firms willing to create a union-friendly “workplace of the future” for service reps is a cautionary tale. Under Morton Bahr, who served as national president for 20 years until his retirement in 2005, the union was one of the AFL-CIO affiliates most eager to experiment with “labor-management partnerships” as a supposedly helpful addition to collective bargaining.

But as early as 1989, Goldman notes, a dissenting AT&T local president in New York City named Laura Unger refused to participate in “quality of work-life” (QWL) programs. Unger warned that the goal of QWL training was to get workers “to internalize the goals of management,” under the guise of empowering them. In her view, such joint programs were part of an anti-union strategy that would lead to union members acting “against their own self-interest as workers.”

Anti-QWL sentiment gained further traction among 60,000 NYNEX (now Verizon) workers who struck, successfully, against contract concessions that same year. After the four-month CWA-IBEW work stoppage, management unleashed a blizzard of warm and fuzzy schemes for “Process Improvement,” “Self-Managing Teams,” and “Making Things Better”—all under the rubric of a “Vision Quest” for “Quality.”

NYNEX locals began to develop a different post-strike agenda. Local officers and stewards received Labor Notes-assisted training about the pitfalls of quality circles. This union education was conducted under the wing of Jan Pierce, a CWA regional vice president, whose political differences with Bahr led to his defeat a few years later by a CWA headquarters-backed candidate.

While influenced by the Labor Notes critiques of QWL, one upstate NY telecom local, issued its own policy statement, entitled “Their Quality and Ours.” This document opposed joint programs that would bypass the union and “require conformity to company-determined objectives, divide workers into competing groups internally and statewide, undermine workplace conditions, and erode the independence of the union.”

To counter this threat, NYNEX locals developed a coordinated campaign to get the Public Service Commission in New York to impose new quality standards on the company’s landline service (then more widely used and regulated). The goal was to pressure management to hire more techs and service reps, under conditions that would allow them to serve customers better.

Call center shut-downs, driven by Covid four years ago, added a new wrinkle to the struggle for workplace improvements when customer calls were re-directed to service reps working from home. For many CWA at AT&T and Verizon, this eliminated the need for long commutes, leading to more family time, reduced absenteeism, and greater job satisfaction.

So last year, customer service reps made their voices heard again in a lively CWA presidential campaign debate about whether they should still have the flexibility to work from home or be herded back into traditional workplaces with less desirable conditions.

There’s no better back story to that recent tug-of-war than Disconnected, with its well-researched account of call center work and its continuing discontents.

Steve Early was a CWA international rep and organizer in the Northeast between 1980 and 2007. He was involved in organizing, bargaining, and strike activity by call center workers at AT&T and Verizon. He remains active in the union as a NewsGuild/CWA member. He can be reached at Lsupport[at]aol[dot]com