Are call centers sweatshops?

Abstract

A call center is a division that specializes in dealing with customers. Early studies on call centers regarded them as strategically important areas that, despite some negative aspects, were acknowledged to possess a certain level of expertise and to have a high degree of autonomy as interfaces for customers. However, this view gradually changed, with call centers coming to be seen as workplaces typified by harsh working conditions and isolated from the other divisions of the company. Therefore, research in recent years has entirely focused on these negative aspects, while ignoring the positive aspects.

Perceptions of third country migrants about secondary labor market concentration. A case of call center jobs in Romania

“…Zhang and Grenier (2013) consider this to be a form of discrimination that ultimately leads to marginalization: not having destination language skills, migrants are clustered into minority language groups, which restricts their access to the job market, and pushes them onto the secondary labor market, where, once arrived, migrants will have to accept the conditions imposed by the employer. In the case of the so-called "electronic sweatshops" (Sato 2018), migrants will have to deal with impoverished work content (Ripamonti and Galuppo 2016): some of the migrants soon understood that the sacrifices made were not worth it. Not only that the sacrifices and the workload are high, but the migrants employed in the secondary labor market are often regarded as dutiful executors of monotonous and repetitive tasks, based on preplanned scripts, as reflected by opinions shared about having to type on the computer what was heard on the phone.…”

“…The tasks to be performed in call centers are rather monotonous and repetitive, while the work schedule is stressful, with pressure being applied by the management in order to push workers to reach quantitative targets. This has made several authors to describe call centers as "electronic sweatshops" (Sato 2018), to be "Fordist" (Ishtiyaque and Gera 2014;Sallaz 2019, 198), or to have a "Taylorist structure" (Hingst and Lowe 2008;Mustosmäki et al 2013;Sinha and Gabriel 2016, 91). According to the Fordist/Taylorist logic, it is the management of the organization that determines how the job should be carried out and with what tools.…”