ABSTRACT
The location of contact centres varies widely in different parts of the world, reflecting diversities in technology and culture (Bonnet, 2002).
3 PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF WORK
3.1 Customer Service Representative (CSR)
Contact centre workers are knowledge workers (Drucker, 1959) who perform abstract/immaterial work (Marx, 1990). They organize and redirect the information, performing virtual delivery of products, keeping and managing the relationship between capital and clients of the service sector. CSR’s are reduced to mere gestures and tasks that do not allow them to develop their mental capabilities, being considered mere extensions of the computer, leading to a total absence of passion and autonomy at work. The worker is restrained to a cubicle in a room, having access to a shared keyboard, chair, headset and mouse, where there is the absence of proper cleaning and regulated room temperature. The worker has also to be fast, attentive, friendly, emotionally balanced, flexible and needs to be able to deal with unexpected situations; the training is very occasional, mostly virtual and in the attendance seat; the teams are formed by 20 to 30 workers, managed by one supervisor. There are also occasions of moral, gender and racial harassment, where female workers are screamed at. Career progression is very scarce or even null, being the role of supervisor the highest one that a CSR can achieve. In most cases, this leads to the lack of a sense of belonging to the company. According to Brophy (2009), the neotaylorist mode of production provides the workers with low wages, high stress, precarious employment, rigid management, draining emotional labor and a pervasive electronic surveillance. Quoting a female British CSR:
“It’s almost like you were at the sweatshops, sometimes they expected you to do so many calls per day, they expect you to do the donations and the rate that you are supposed to get on them was quite very intense. If you didn’t reach the target they would be on your back every hour until you get it.” (Female Charity CSR, 55 years of age, November 2015)
Taylor and Bain (1999) have identified the contradiction between the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of the labor process in contact centres, which cannot be resolved, creating an assembly-line in the worker’s head. So, we can see that in contact centres there is a high level of stress, emotional exhaustion and job insecurity which leads to the vulnerabilization of the worker. The worker’s identity is deconstructed through the non-identification with
the role of Customer Service Representative, the impossibility of constructing a professional career leading to the absence of an occupational identity and a feeling of belonging to the company (Huws, 2003). In this sense, a process of subjectification takes place, creating a “cybernetic personality” where the non-equivalence of professional and educational skills, adapted to the tasks and to the wage, result in a process of “status discord”, i.e., disqualification (Kosugi, 2008). In this sense, and being considered as the fastest developing form of e-work, contact centres are conceived as “information processing factories” or “modern-day sweatshops”, providing images of call handlers chained to cage-like workstations by their headphones (Paul & Huws, 2002:71).
