By Hakan Turgut
Recently, Turkish newspapers have reported on the “outrage” caused by the response given by a call centre representative to a customer who contacted the call centre of a large company, which then led to campaigns to cancel subscriptions. In response to this, the CEO of the company made a statement saying that “this response was not company policy, that the problems of the subscribers would be solved immediately, that the call centre employee who made the relevant call was dismissed, and that the subscribers (consumers) should be patient”.
Reading through the fine print, we learned that the employee was a mother working from home for a subcontractor by the main company in a town in Anatolia. Although her child had a fever that day, she could not take the day off, she could not take her child to the hospital, and as a result could not attend to the customer given such frustrations.
On the one hand, a mother working from home is not able to take her child to the hospital, and on the other hand, the CEO’s statements suggests what working for a call centre is really like.
Capitalism’s DNA
Call centres have become increasingly important supporters of the “technological revolution” in the last decade of capitalism.
It is possible to compare this development to the intensified clustering of labour communities in the automotive sector during the 1940s and in heavy industry before that.
Internet technologies, the formation of giant trusts selling over the internet and their rise in the 2000s (Amazon, Alibaba, Facebook, Godaddy, Hepsiburada, Trendyol, etc.) have made call centres almost a symbol of the new era of business.
These companies have been rapidly expanding in both the imperial core and the periphery countries through new acquisitions and as a result have become one of the largest employment areas for educated youth looking for jobs, as well as those displaced by the shrinking of the workforce in the industrial sector.
A similar development process is being observed in Türkiye. Call centres first started in the banking sector and continued by diversifying into telecommunication companies, then it became effectively compulsory for almost all manufacturers to have a call centre. Today, in the eyes of consumers, there is a perception that a company without a customer service number cannot provide adequate service.
The job description of call centres, which used to be limited to providing instructions for using products and fielding complaints, now includes roles such as sales, pre-sale and after-sale public relations. The satisfaction of company management has now become directly tied to the satisfaction level of the customers calling phone lines. As with the example above, newspapers are full of headlines about companies that have succeeded or failed due to a fateful customer service interaction.
Thus, call centres have become the “telephone representative” of capitalism and corporations.
This is a dynamic that increases the permanence, importance and value of call centres for capitalism.
In Türkiye, intensive call centre establishments are growing dramatically both in central and peripheral cities. The state’s encouragement of the establishment of such businesses, especially in provincial cities (saying “we will provide 3000 jobs in X province!”) has helped to protect these centres and to encourage companies to locate there with special incentives. In the last 10 years, the sector has grown by 10-15% each year and employs around 160,000 people.
Provinces such as Gaziantep, Urfa, Erzurum, Balıkesir, Van, Erzincan, Sivas and Batman have become call centre paradises. The capitals also seem to like the fact that there are universities in these cities. Most of the employees graduating from universities in these cites start working for these companies, regardless of what they studied.
Especially with the rise of unemployment caused by shrinking job opportunities due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the difficulty inflationary economic conditions in central cities, and the technological developments that have led to the introduction of remote work, call centres have been transforming homes into workplaces.
University graduates who cannot find a job in their field, who cannot work in a supermarket or in seasonal employment areas such as construction, who must return to their hometowns after barely finishing their education, and especially women and LGBTQI+ individuals who face difficulty finding work in traditional workplaces, are intensively employed in this field.
Moreover, if the company they work for is multinational, it becomes a very attractive option for these people, who at least can escape unemployment.
Although it is such an important sector for capitalism, the treatment of its workers is exactly the opposite. Basic problems such as very low wages, difficult working conditions, a lack of social security and other basic provisions for call centre workers such as occupational health and safety standards, as well as disorganisation and de-unionisation have made this industry’s workers prey to all kinds of ills.
This precarity creates a group of workers who are often forced to work for pay that is lower than minimum wage, who are left completely vulnerable to economic downswings, and who are therefore unable to “hold on to a place” by constantly changing jobs.
What is to be done?
Of course, organising and unionising workers, especially those concentrated in peripheral cities, requires considerable effort. The fact that the existing political structures, and even the unions themselves, have made central cities their base, as well as the high turnover and the low number of permanent workplaces has caused organising in this sector to fall off union radar.
The unions in the sector are either organised in areas opened to them by the state (e.g. Türk Telekom), or they are led by a party, group or political movement.
Therefore, there are very few unions that can both recognise the demands and energies of the dynamic population in this sector, and engage in active class struggle unionism with these workers, without any kind of ulterior commitments or motivations.
Çağrı-İş
At this point, Çağrı-İş (English pronunciation: cha-ruh-ish) stands out as a union that is independent from the existing trade union confederations, founded and led by workers actively working in the sector. It has just come off of a recent organizing drive and has made statements about its commitment to class-struggle unionism.
Çağrı İş is working to create a pluralistic decision-making process in order to establish workers’ democracy in unions. This is necessary for it to start to be a hope for the workers in the sector who are disillusioned. We hope that together with other similar groups, it can continue to be one of the elements of a wave that will reverse the state of disorganisation and lack of power in the sector.
