Work remains the main activity that most of us will spend the majority of our time doing, and so we urgently need to find alternatives to how it is currently organised. Achieving this requires new forms of workplace organisation, experimenting with and updating the best traditions of trade unions. There needs to be opposition to the use of these surveillance methods. When talking about improving working conditions, too often we focus on the issue of pay – important as it is – rather than control. But a solution to this precariousness does not have to be limited to stricter employment contracts. With many of the processes in call centres becoming automated, workers face yet another threat to their future job security. This fear puts greater power in the hands of bullying and abusive managers, able to engage in spectacle-like punishment, armed with reams of data from the electronic panopticons that watch over us. People do not want to stay in these sort of jobs for the long term, yet at the same time they fear losing them. The spread of precariousness has transformed contemporary work. This incentive to escape the workplace perhaps helps explain why there are astonishingly high turnover rates at call centres in the UK. Rather than paying bonuses – or offering a decent flexible working policy to fit in with the employees’ lives – the option to knock off a bit earlier was dangled as a carrot, and entirely on the employer’s terms. The most effective motivator the managers had at their disposal was letting workers leave early if they met their targets. The workers had to regulate their own behaviour, knowing that at any moment they could lose their job. This precariousness was used as a managerial strategy to discipline and motivate workers, creating an oppressive, stressful, and exploitative workplace. ![]() This environment was psychologically draining for many of the workers and created a very tangible feeling of precariousness. A large TV hung from the ceiling showing a running total of how many sales each worker made, ranked in order. These targets were displayed on whiteboards at the end of each row of desks. ![]() Adding to the weight of surveillance were gruelling targets.
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