Resolution – Passed by CWA Convention, August 25, 2003
Customer Service Professionals
Customer Service Professionals are proud members of CWA whether they work in Telecom, Airline, Newspaper, or the Public Sector. Our members want to be allowed to do a good job for their employer, provide excellent service for their customers, and feel valued for the work they perform.
Unfortunately, many employers in the U.S. and around the world are degrading the work of Customer Service Professionals by following the low road to customer service. The low road emphasizes control through quotas, tight scripting, limited call handling times, unrealistic sales objectives, low wages, and an outsourced workforce. The low road pits workers against workers in a global race to the bottom.
CWA supports the high road to customer service, the professional model which recognizes this work as complex, requiring employee discretion and knowledge. The high road emphasizes employee skills, career opportunities, continuous learning, collaboration, flexible responses to customers instead of fixed scripts, down-time to complete tasks and time to breathe.
In a widely cited report, Forrester Research Inc, predicts that American employers will move about 3.3 million service jobs overseas. This represents a loss of $136 billion in wages over the next 15 years, up from $4 billion in 2000. If this and other predictions like it come true, few customer service jobs will exist in the U.S. by 2018.
Outsourcing of work is not a new problem to CWA, but the extent and distance that our jobs are now moving are breathtaking. Call center work is moving around the globe – pushed by major corporations including: AT&T, Verizon Wireless, GE, AVIS, Dell Computers, Amazon.com, Whirlpool, American Express, and CitiGroup. GE Capital alone has four call centers with 15,000 employees in India.
Telecom New Zealand shows us how low the low road can go, having outsourced all customer service work, along with operator and technical services. But outsourcing to other parts of the globe does not stand alone; the outsourcing to non-union companies in the United States is also running rampant. AT&T has outsourced 70% of its long distance customer care work, 20% has been moved abroad.
India, with a highly educated workforce but low wage economy, is increasingly the recipient of outsourced call center work. Call Center Colleges have sprung up to train “customer service executives” to speak and sound like Americans, Australians, or Brits; ready to work for $40 per week, with no benefits. Arundhati Roy, the world renowned Indian author, writes in a recent book about taking a visitor to a Call Center College in Gurgaon on the outskirts of Delhi.
I thought it would be interesting for him to see how easily an ancient civilization can be made to abase itself completely. In a Call Center College, hundreds of young English speaking Indians are being groomed to staff the backroom operations of giant transnational companies. They are trained to answer telephone queries from the United States and United Kingdom.
On no account must the caller know that his or her inquiry is being attended to by an Indian sitting at a desk on the outskirts of Delhi. The Call Center College trains their students to speak in American or British accents. They have to read foreign papers so they can chitchat about the news or weather. On duty they have to change their given names, Sushma becomes Mary, Govind becomes Jerry…. Call Center workers are paid one-tenth of the salaries of their counterparts abroad. From all accounts, call centers are billed to become a multibilliondollar industry.
Threats of outsourcing are faced by Customer Service Professionals regardless of where they work. The stress, monitoring, relentless sales quotas, scheduling problems, health and safety issues, lack of time to catch-up and to breathe are issues faced around the globe. Our response must be global as well.
CWA is actively working with UNI (Union Network International), the major global union federation with which CWA is affiliated for telecom, broadcasting and printing, to promote participation in a Call Center Workers Global Action Week – October 6-10th. Customer Service Professionals around the world will wear the same Solidarity Stickers to bring attention to the low road workplace issues.
CWA has been working to get consumer “right-to-know” legislation introduced and adopted at the State level. Such bills require customer service representatives to disclose to consumers, who they work for, where they are located, and their name (or a registered alias). The New Jersey State Assembly drafted a model “right-to-know” bill and is scheduled to vote on it in November. The Hawaii legislature adopted a “right-to- know” resolution. Corporations and Chambers of Commerce are aggressively opposing these state legislative initiatives because they threaten to expose the intentional deception being perpetrated on the American consumer.
RESOLVED: That the Communications Workers of America supports high road customer service and will continue to use collective bargaining, organizing, and political strategies to maintain high road union-represented customer service jobs.
RESOLVED: That the 65th Convention of the Communications Workers of America encourages all locals with Customer Service Professionals members to participate in the Customer Service Global Action Day on October 8th.
RESOLVED: The Communications Workers of America supports the consumers right to know with whom they are doing business and will work to have “right to know” customer service legislation introduced and passed at the State level.
