CALL CENTRES THE NEW ‘DARK SATANIC MILLS’?

Here’s an article in Management Issues, January 2004, reporting on the HSE comment likening the worst call centres to ‘dark satanic mills’.

Here’s the HSE report in question, in which monotony and lack of autonomy are shown to be causes of stress. Interestingly, I don’t see the term ‘dark satanic mill’  here so there may be some discrepancy between the formal report and the words used in press releases and interviews with the author. I am now digging around my old hard disks to see if I can find the source of the original quote. At the moment, the best I have is a comment reported on a BBC website. Of course, the source may have been updated since 2004, as I remember this comparison caused quite a stir.

Here’s a BBC News report  from the time, in which Christine Sprigg, author of the HSE report, is reported to use the term ‘dark satanic mills’. Here, you can also see comments from people who were working in UK call centres at the time.

Update 10 March 2011: Dr Christine Sprigg emailed me after the talk and told me some more about provenance of the ‘dark satanic mills’ statement. As far as she knows, it first appeared in this press release, from the British Psychological Society, early in 2004. Although it’s titled ‘Call centres are “new satanic mills”‘, the press release goes on to say:

Ms Sprigg said: “Not all call centres are ‘satanic mills’. Some do merit that description, but the best do not. The task facing organisations that use call centres is to match their aspirations for high service for their customers with high quality of working for their staff.”

…the inference is that some call centres deserve this epithet. And this was seized on by unions and journalists around the UK as it fitted prevailing concerns about these new work places. In a recent email exchange, Dr Sprigg recalled ‘personally I can’t remember even saying that! The Call Centre Association (CCA) got a bit upset at the time. It…snowballed massively.’

Just to add to the confusion, here’s a Channel 4 news page, dated 2002 but updated in 2005 that also makes the reference.

Dr Sprigg also pointed out this paper: ‘An Assembly Line in the Head‘ (Taylor and Bain, 1999) which talks about Taylorism in the call centre. The ‘assembly line’ in question is the stack of calls awaiting the call centre operator, no matter how swifty he or she can deal with their current caller. Here, the authors also refer to the stress of ’emotional labour’ – the need to keep check of your own emotions in the call centre, ‘smile down the phone’ and keep within certain boundaries of acceptable conduct and language.  They explain how call centre technology cuts out manual tasks, such as dialling numbers, that slow work down (see my notes on ‘wasted motion’ above). As one manager pointed out:

Dialling manually you can make only 30 calls and speak to 10 people. The power dialler will get 80 phone calls and you speak to everyone one of them in a four-hour shift. 10 to 80.

Automation like this boosts productivity but demands employees to keep pace with the relentless call centre machine. And the call centre technology can measure the pace of work of every employee, throughout the day.

Crucially, Taylor and Bain point out that call centre employees do sometimes resist this work structure – either individually, for instance by finding ways to manipulate management to get better shifts, or collectively, via unions. In the UK, unions have negotiated everything from more teabreaks to better maternity leave for its (majority) female employees. Of course, this paper was written in 1999, before the era of ‘outsourcing’, when faster data networks have enabled companies to site their call centres around the world, cherry picking countries according to their wage costs, labour laws and so on. It would be fascinating to know how closely this represents life in the call centre today, in Europe, India and beyond.