Aren Aizura writes, "I work in a market research call centre in the centre of Melbourne. The hours are the weirdest I have ever worked. Shifts are limited to four hours from 5-9pm weeknights. It's both the worst time to work if you want to have a life (or like cooking and eating dinner) and the worst time to harass people to do pointless surveys -- because they actually do have lives. I'm the person you hang up on after I say 'hello'; I'm the person who says their name and then asks if you've been fishing lately, or bought toothpaste lately, or would-you have-a-couple-of-minutes-to-complete-this-short-survey-it-won't-take-long.
Most market research interviewing in Australia is paid at a relatively lush hourly rate. At my last job, the hourly rate never changed but we always had job quotas -- how many interviews we were required to finish per hour. Everyone's results were printed out and left in the tearoom for workers to inspect every few hours, an incentive to work harder that deployed the workers' own desire to be "friendly" with the team leaders (who were all younger than most of the interviewers and unfailingly NICE) but also a spirit of competition. There were only 30 workstations -- market research as cottage industry -- and everyone knew everyone else, which meant that sociality at work depended on and was produced through this spirit of competition.
Six months ago I moved to a much larger, more well-known market research company with around 150 workstations on the fifth floor of an innercity office building. Because it's so much bigger, the surveillance and monitoring systems are more computerised -- any workstation phone can be listened to by the supervisers, who can simultaneously monitor the activities of any of the ancient DOS machines from their own computers. And these guys have developed casualisation (or 'flexibility') into a fine art. At my previous workplace, shifts were arranged on a weekly basis, although it was always up to us to ring and provide our 'availability' for the next week and no guarantees of work were given in advance. Here, one calls at a given time each day to book for the night shift. When there's not much work, this turns into a nightmare: everyone calls at 11.30am, there are only two people answering, and so you can spend half an hour of your morning listening to an engaged tone, pressing redial 30 times a minute, waiting to get through and book a shift. By 11.45, they may already be booked out.
As well, the pay structure is vastly different. Some 'projects' (mostly the government ones) are paid on a basic hourly rate. Other surveys (overwhelmingly the corporate ones) are paid per survey. So, your fortnightly pay might be the sum of x surveys per working day multiplied by x working days. In order to keep this legally in accordance with award rates, the company tallies up your pay according to the award rate and makes up any shortfall in a three-monthly lump sum. Ie, if you earned below the award wage over three months, you receive the shortfall.
In our induction/training sessions, pay-per-survey was marketed to workers as a way of earning more money. "If you develop good skills, you can earn up to $26 an hour!" Really, it's a cost-cutting procedure for the company: they don't have to pay you for any of the time you spend calling numbers where people aren't home, are engaged, refuse, ask you to call back, or begin a survey and hang up halfway through. Even at hourly rates, we're only paid for the moments when we're actually making calls. (In a four-hour shift, this ends up being about 3 hours and 40 minutes even if you only have a 10 minute break: setting up your computer, shutting it down at the ends of shifts etc takes up the other 10 minutes.)
All this -- the microscopic details of payments and conditions, the "fine print" as it were -- does seem kinda of boring. But there's a point to laying it all out here, which is that our collective work practices are finely tuned to the rate/method of payment. The size of the call centre I'm currently working in means that subjective incentives to work harder through job quotas aren't necessary. Instead, much of the time, there's a direct relationship between the amount of money we earn and how hard we work. This is where it becomes subjective, and this is where my experience of time (and anxiety) becomes important.
The last couple of weeks, we've been working on a survey for a large company. It doesn't really matter what the content of the survey was. Rote repetition of the script in market research mean that whatever bureaucratic, badly-written 'meaning' you gleaned when you first read it out is lost within the first few hours of saying it. It's a terrifying survey, takes about fifteen minutes. People are asked to rate a series of things on a scale between zero and 10 ('Where zero is extremely dissatisfied and ten is extremely satisfied.' Blergh.) Anyhow, we are being paid per survey, of course. In the first half-hour of my shift, in between phonecalls, I calculate the number of surveys I need to get tonight to make up the hourly rate. This is what everyone does -- in fact, the rates can fluctuate almost every day depending on the previous day's statistics and the location you're calling.
Now, this statement seems deceptively casual, but it creates a feedback loop that paradoxically results in both more 'worker productivity' and less pay. At the beginning of a 'project', the rates are always high. This instils a false sense of security -- you feel great, actually, because it's easy to tot up the cash. In this line of work, you generally meet with more success if you feel confident. So, the confidence results in a more persuasive tone, more surveys for everyone, more productivity for the company.
The next day, before we start our shift, the Admin team runs the figures and discovers that yesterday's crew had earnt far more than the hourly rate. This means that the rates will drop -- by maybe a dollar or $1.50. So we all go to our workstations, pull out a notebook and pen and run the figures on how many surveys we need to get tonight. It might end up being two or three more than last night. Everyone works a little harder. The next day, the rates have dropped again -- with slight fluctuations for each state because Sydneysiders are notoriously harder to persuade than Queenslanders, and Tasmanian country folk always want to talk (forever, sometimes.) By the end of the first week, the rates have dropped to the point where you cannot earn the equivalent of the hourly award rate unless you work really, really hard.
Thus, 'work' and the way we pass time at work is not simply a matter of sitting at a computer and talking to people at some points, or not. You spend moments running figures so you can work out how hard you need to work in order to make enough money. You calculate to a minute precisely how long a survey must take and how many minutes in an hour you can afford to spend listening to answering machines, refusals, making appointments. In rough moments when you're behind quota, you even calculate whether staying on the phone, trying to persuade some old, querulous or hesitant person to do the interview is more effective than calling a slew of fresh numbers. Micro-calcalations, micro-segments of time, a minute, three minutes. 10 seconds for a number to ring out, 20 seconds for the answering machine message, one minute for the standard introduction and the sound of the person on the other end hanging up. You run the figures constantly, time against money: I need three surveys in half an hour but two if I can make five in the next hour.
I have no way of knowing exactly how many of the 100 workers actually does make the required number of interviewers to earn the equivalent of the award rate. At a guess, it would be around 25%. A lot of people sit around smoking in their breaks and look depressed. This is why the rates fall: because it makes more economical sense for the company to owe people some money than to enable them to earn more.
I sometimes theorise a strategy of resistance in these number-running experiments. The numbers are crunched on the basis of our labour/time. If everyone slowed down (earning a little less) we might force the daily rates to stay at the same high rate. But the workplace is so fragmented, and communication is so difficult, that such a mass action seems improbable. Plus, everyone is always poor. We all want to earn as much as we can. Tomorrow, maybe, we won't get a shift; next week there may not be any work at all. The very flexibility (instability) of the work means that we are always making hay while the sun shines. It's a (post)modern irony that we do this in a dank, dark, fluorescent-lit office, surrounded by tall buildings, where actual sunlight never penetrates. "
