ABSTRACT

Contact Babel states that 958,925 people are employed in the UK’s 5,040 call (or contact) centres, equating to 3% of the working population. Currently 862,070 people (Key Note) are estimated to work in front-line customer contact, with a projection that over 1 million people will be working in UK contact centres by 2012 (CCA, 2010). It is a over a decade since the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) started to examine working practices in call centres as health and safety concerns grew over this relatively new form of work. Research by Christine Sprigg and Phoebe Smith at the Health and Safety Laboratory (HSL), funded by the Local Authority Unit of HSE, resulted in a number of contributions to both practice, for example a Local Authority Circular (94/1) first issued in November 1999, and theory (see Sprigg& Jackson, 2006; Sprigg, Smith& Jackson, 2003; Sprigg, Stride, Wall, Holman & Smith, 2007).