Marble Falls On a recent Wade’s World, I talked to Debbie Goldman, the former research director for many years of the Communications Workers of America (CWA). The excuse for the conversation was an excerpt running in the coming Social Policy and her book, Disconnected: Call Center Workers Fight for Good Jobs in the Digital Age. The book is a good read on some many levels.
Goldman does a deep dive in the experiences of customer service workers, then and now, at AT&T, before and after the antitrust breakup, and Bell Atlantic, now a part of Verizon. This is a story of deskilling, automation, women’s work, and more as changes have been wrought over the last decades for these workers, and the fights, won and lost, that the workers, their leaders, and their union have fought to try and protect wages, benefits, and, most importantly, some humane parts of the job. The changes for individual workers have been huge. Many of the call center jobs have been contracted out here and abroad. The jobs for the survivors have been depersonalized, and commercialized. Service has too often been transformed into a form of sales.
Reading the book and talking to Goldman, it was hard to keep from being a bit nostalgic about common practices fifty years ago that are unheard of now. Telephone books hardly exist, for example. I can remember not being able to find a number or needing a number for a long-distance call and calling 411. A real person would pick up the phone and help you find the number. Now 411 is something that pops up on your computer screen when there’s a problem. Lily Tomlin on YouTube may be the closest thing people now can get to the experience.
I can remember one of our buildings having an old switchboard. Many of us can remember the multi-button phones. In the 70s, I can remember having an early year-end meeting at the Southwestern Bell building near the Capitol. They were regulated by the local Public Service Commission then, so you would hear from their community service people. ACORN was a regular presence before the PSC on utility fights in the early 70s, and Bell didn’t want a problem with us. Those days are long, long gone.
Listening to Goldman’s interview, Russell Carpenter, KABF’s volunteer engineer, sent me a wayback note as well, saying…
I was a Long-Distance Telephone Operator on one of the last cord systems located on 8th and Louisiana, across from the old library from ’79 to ’81, and was a member or CWA then. I had some of the best supervisors then. I really did learn a lot about customer service, and I actually saw one of my old supervisors at an election meeting and was very happy to tell her that she taught me a lot about customer service. I left just before the breakup, and saw the coming computer revolution, in fact, I saw my first desktop computer when I was there. Fast forwarding to the early 2000’s, I worked as a part-time customer worker for a market research firm in Sherwood (Flake-Wilkerson Market Research.) We did customer feedback for ATT. DirectTV, banks and others across the country. It was very interesting, the comments, in particular one I received from California that only said that ATT was the devil. It was non-union and mandatory Saturdays, but it was a job. Anyway, I’m glad … to know that there are Americans still out there doing this.
Those were the days, and what these jobs have become now for call center workers is incomparable. Unionized workers have better wages and benefits by miles compared to minimum wage contract workers, but they have to fight for 15 minutes in their day to be able to actually do service and follow-up on customer problems. Their grandmothers and mothers wouldn’t recognize the job they do now, even if it’s called something similar.
There are still millions of workers around the globe doing this work, but it’s impossible to compare their jobs to the call center workers still represented by CWA. Their fight needs to be all of our fight.