‘Get paid, get out’: online resistance to call centre labour in Canada

Abstract

This qualitative content analysis of 503 anonymous online reviews of 52 Canadian call centres posted on RateMyEmployer.ca explores how forms of resistance, alienation and emotional labour are expressed outside of the workplace. Our study finds that digital publics are producing emotive insurgencies and networks of support within marginalised communities that undermine employers’ attempts at deadening the workforce. The reviews exemplify worker awareness of exploitation as some connect these issues to broader socio‐economic factors that are beyond their control. While many offer tactics to challenge and destabilise their working conditions and culture as well as heartfelt and sarcastic warnings of what one might expect if they pursue call centre employment, others use the online space as a means of venting frustrations, eliciting empathies and expressing sentiments of hope(lessness).

Working with emotions: cultural employee perspectives to service management expectations

“…On the theoretical front, findings reveal the importance of incorporating context into emotion regulation and EL research. Johnston et al, 2019). Our findings serve to confirm that EL, and in fact, all forms of emotion regulation and displays, can only be fully understood in affinity to its cultural context.…”

New Technology, Work and Employment in the era of COVID‐19: reflecting on legacies of research

“…If there is an increase in distributed work, there will likely be an increase in distributed resistance, both individual and collective. Although unions have historically had difficulties in exercising influence over the processes of technological change (Deery, 1989), there have been many documented accounts of resistance, both collective and individual (see Bain and Taylor, 2000; Barnes, 2007; McCabe, 2014; Johnston et al ., 2019). This journal has published numerous accounts outlining the potential for solidarity among homeworkers (Törenli, 2010) and expressions of resistance explored in the context of Facebook (Cohen and Richards, 2015), blogs (Richards, 2008) and other social networking sites (Conway et al ., 2019).…”

Populist Counterpublics: Exploring Populist Mobilization, Crises of Representation, and Popular Subjectivities in Canadian Politics

“…What Sarah Pink et al call (2016, p. 5) "virtual sociologists" have paid special attention to social media over the last decade and a half, including popular websites and apps such as MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and others to better understand how "inequality is complicated, extended, and reproduced by digital media technologies," and how the circulation of discourses (and by extension, subjectivities) take shape in virtual spaces alongside physical ones. For example, my colleagues and I have shown elsewhere how employer rating websites work to build resistant discourses and subjectivities to oppressive workplace conditions (Johnston, Sanscartier & Johnston, 2018Johnston, Johnston, Sanscartier & Ramsay, 2019) Understanding social media in this way is especially important for this project, given my methodological restrictions. As I have noted above, for ethical reasons I felt uncomfortable and was unwilling asking for listservs or contact information for members of these organizations in my interviews.…”

“…To drive this final point further, consider the fact that the Council has a "Boycott Nestle Pledge", the point of which is simply to sign and publicise one's commitment to the organization. One important function of this pledge is to bind the individual member into what Benedict Anderson originally called an "imagined community", an idea which has since been applied considerably to social media and the creation of digital publics more broadly (Gruzd, Tiryakian, Wellman & Takhtyev, 2011;Lovari & Parisi, 2015;Johnston, Johnston, Sanscartier & Ramsay, 2019). Whereas the CTF communicates the fruits of their counterpublic to fully passive members, and ACORN relies on the physical copresence of staff/members to bind individuals to a shared popular subjectivity, the Council distributes "moral resources" primarily through digital mechanisms like the pledge, which allows members to act alone in concert with others.…”

“…In the cases presented in this chapter, what we witness is the construction of a "race-conscious space", but one that inverses the usual goal of the concept. It is a race-conscious "digital public" (Johnston, Johnston, Sanscartier & Ramsay, 2019), in which members are allowed, and indeed encouraged, to feel protective of their whiteness and collective dominance. Whites that exist within the space defend their whiteness and do so with the sense that what they have is eroding.…”