Work Related

I had another exciting day at work last Thursday, maybe a little bit too exciting, because I'm still baffled about what happened at our weekly meeting with the manager. Once again I had to set the record straight...

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So, for those of you who don't know this yet; I have a job as a technical help-desk-phone-jockey, working at a large internet, television and phone provider. I used to love that job, as it gives me great pleasure to be able to help people who desperately need their internet-connection get connected again. And I'm good at my job, even if I say so myself; I hear it in the myriad of positive remarks I get from the customers directly, as well as in all the statistics that are being kept that have me always at the very top of the "customer-satisfaction" figures. However, through the years there has been put more and more bias on sales; if you read any of my posts, I think you won't be surprised to her that I don not score well in that department at all. In short: I sell the bare minimum of what's expected from me, while maintaining the outstanding customer-satisfaction levels, and that combination enables me to keep my job...

At this week's meeting we were introduced to a new statistic; we can now look up, on an excel spreadsheet, how much we've cost the company this week. As soon as the manager uttered the words "cost the company", I lost it. You see, there's constant pressure on us, the lowly payed help-desk-agents, to worry about the corporations bottom-line. We're constantly told how fierce the competition is and how we must fight for every drop of market-share there is to be had. The company is now trying something new that is, as always, aimed at suppressing costs, and will ideally cut an entire management-level; we, the agents, must now organize in groups and plan our own weekly meeting to discuss all the stuff the floor-manager now discusses with us. Eventually we must develop self-managing little subdivisions that compete against the other subdivisions, and we'll compete primarily on sales figures, of course. This is why we are increasingly exposed to all those statistics that are actually meant to be aiding the daily work of the first management level.

So, when the manager said we will be given an indication of how much we cost the company, how much we're supposedly suppressing its profit-margin, how much we're hurting it, I immediately asked: "does the spreadsheet also show us how much we earn for the company?" And everyone went silent, including the manager. So I elaborated: "Wouldn't the upper management be completely out of their mind to pay us more than we earn for them? Do you all really believe that we all must be grateful to be payed a salary? Or do you believe that management has an obligation to make money for the board of directors and their shareholders." After apologizing for my crude interruption, and for being an old-fashioned social democrat, the manager replied: "No, there's no such column, and it's clear to anyone that the help-desk of any company is a loss, which is made up by the profits they make with sales." "You mean the sales that we're supposed to make?" Silence again. "Also, mr. floor-manager (I don't want to use names), I used to have your job (which is true; I've worked dozens of jobs, especially during the job-hopping 1990s), and I know the help-desk is run as a separate company which gets payed on a per-call basis. That's why average call-times can't exceed 10 minutes, why an agent needs to help a minimum number of customers per set amount of time." Silence. "Yes, I know, it's a great scheme to make money on the products you sell, while simultaneously making money on the defects of those products. But that's not the issue here; the issue is that I used to tell 'my' agents the same bogus story, which is feeding them a lie. Our boss doesn't create jobs. You all know that we only hire new people as a measure of last resort, and only when additional demand for a product or service increases. If you want to play the capitalism-game (still can't believe I used those words in a meeting), know the rules: the boss isn't our benefactor, but instead is a customer on the labor-market, where he buys labor, and where we sell the only thing we have, our time and energy. And since the boss has to make a profit, he only buys labor that earns him more money than it costs him to pay the price of that labor. Never forget that when you're confronted with that new statistic."

And on that note, the meeting was over; it was the last item on the agenda anyway... Most of my colleagues are still very young people, and something struck me when I saw them nodding along with everything the manager had to say about those subdivisions that are supposed to compete with each other. The neoliberal ideology isn't content with just competition between companies, it won't stop until we ALL are each others competition, until society is atomized to the maximum amount they can get away with. I just felt a sincere obligation to remind those youngsters, who are all wonderful people I must say, about the reality of things. I cringe when workers sincerely believe their boss to be their friend, to stand in their corner, to "have their back." Nothing is further from the truth in this economy of ours, which is sad. There are no job-creators to whom we owe gratitude, it is the other way around. You'll almost never hear this out in the real world, as workers have no power and no voice, since unionization has been eroded almost everywhere, and there's also that unmistakable power-relation which makes so much people suck-up to these bosses, as that's the only way to advance through the internal hierarchy of each company. After the meeting the manager took me apart for a moment and made an appointment with me for a private conversation next week. Let's see if I still get to keep my job, or if "freedom of speech" is not as real as some would make us believe it is...

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