Disciplined agency: Neoliberal precarity, generational dispossession and call centre labour in Portugal 9781526134998

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Disciplined agency

New

Ethnographies

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Series editor Alexander Thomas T. Smith

Already published An ethnography of NGO practice in India: Utopias of development Stewart Allen The British in rural France: Lifestyle migration and the ongoing quest for a better way of life Michaela Benson Ageing selves and everyday life in the North of England: Years in the making Catherine Degnen Salvage ethnography in the financial sector: The path to economic crisis in Scotland Jonathan Hearn Occupational health and social estrangement in China Wing-​Chung Ho Chagos islanders in Mauritius and the UK: Forced displacement and onward migration Laura Jeffery South Korean civil movement organisations: Hope, crisis and pragmatism in democratic transition Amy Levine Integration in Ireland: The everyday lives of African migrants Fiona Murphy and Mark Maguire Environment, labour and capitalism at sea: ‘Working the ground’ in Scotland Penny McCall Howard

Loud and proud: Passion and politics in the English Defence League Hilary Pilkington Into the woods: An epistemography of climate change Meritxell Ramírez-​i-​Ollé Literature and agency in English fiction reading: A study of the Henry Williamson Society Adam Reed International seafarers and transnationalism in the twenty-​first century Helen Sampson Tragic encounters and ordinary ethics: The Palestine–​Israel conflict in British universities Ruth Sheldon Devolution and the Scottish Conservatives: Banal activism, electioneering and the ­politics of irrelevance Alexander Smith Exoticisation undressed: Ethnographic nostalgia and authenticity in Emberá clothes Dimitrios Theodossopoulos Immersion: Marathon swimming, embodiment and ­identity Karen Throsby

An ethnography of English football fans: Cans, cops and carnivals Geoff Pearson

Enduring violence: Everyday life and conflict in eastern Sri Lanka Rebecca Walker

Iraqi women in Denmark: Ritual performance and belonging in everyday life Marianne Holm Pedersen

Performing Englishness: Identity and politics in a contemporary folk resurgence Trish Winter and Simon Keegan-​Phipps

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Disciplined agency Neoliberal precarity, generational dispossession and call centre labour in Portugal

Patrícia Alves de Matos

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Patrícia Alves de Matos 2020

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The right of Patrícia Alves de Matos to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 3498 1 hardback First published 2020 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-​party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

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Contents

List of figures

page vi

List of tables

vii

Acknowledgements

viii

List of abbreviations

x

Series editor’s foreword

xi

1 Introduction

1

2 Capitalist and generational transitions in contemporary Portugal

19

3 Call centres as icons of precarity: between emancipation and stigma

38

4 The moral economy of labourer production in call centres

56

5 Clients: operationalising consensus, internalising discipline

77

6 The production of agency: humans disguised as robots

96

7 The dispossessed precariat

117

8 Conclusion

136

References

144

Index

154

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Figures

1.1 3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1 4.2 6.1 6.2

Distribution by region of the call centre sector, Portugal (APCC (2019)) page 3 The patron saint of precarious workers, San Precario (www.sanprecario.info/​) 41 San Precario prayer (www.sanprecario.info/​) 42 The ‘Marcha contra a Precariedade’, Lisbon, 12 September 2008 (www.esquerda.net/​) 50 Plan showing the layout of the call centre at EVA 64 Graphic representation of ‘the client’ and ‘the call centre’ at EVA 71 Worker report as formulated by Symposium 107 The ‘wallboard’ 108

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Tables

6.1 7.1 7.2 7.3

Operators’ daily productivity report Operators’ year of birth and average age Operators’ parents: level of education and occupation Operators’ education levels

page 105 118 119 121

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Acknowledgements

This book could not exist without the support, inspiration and encouragement of many people and institutions. I wish to thank the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology and the European Research Council for funding my research and the writing of this book. I began formulating the main arguments and ideas contained here during a period of my life that I proudly call my ‘Goldsmiths years’. For some years, while training to become an anthropologist, I  was a member of the Anthropology Department of Goldsmiths, University of London. During my ‘Goldsmiths years’ I  was fortunate enough to meet and engage with experienced anthropologists, including Sophie Day, Massimiliano Mollona, Frances Pine, Victoria Goddard, Ricardo Leizaola, Keith Hart, Brian Morris, Mark Lamont, Rebecca Cassidy, Catherine Alexander and Laura Bear. I thank them sincerely for their constructive comments, insightful advice and words of encouragement. They have pushed me to sharpen my ideas and to refine and mature my analysis, and have enabled me to grow in confidence. During my time at Goldsmiths my colleagues were an additional source of support and inspiration. They were able to remind me that there is life beyond the academia, and went to the trouble of reading and commenting extensively on early versions of chapters: my warm thanks to Eleftheria Lekakis, Stefania Charitou, Eva Katona, Claire Loussouarn, Michal Sipos, Olivia Swift, Anikó Horváth, Andrea Pisac, Allan Brewster and Theodoros Rakopoulos. At Goldsmiths I met Steve Nugent, who was first my Ph.D. supervisor, and later became a mentor and a friend. Steve sadly passed away in November 2018. It is difficult to overstate the extent of his contribution to this book. Almost every argument, analysis and conclusion is the result of the many conversations we had in his office or the numerous emails exchanged between countries over the years. I will always be indebted to him, and will always be thankful for his unfailing generosity and uncompromising commitment in ensuring clarity and rigour in my anthropological endeavours. His critical thinking and intellectual honesty will remain with me as a unique source of inspiration. More recently, I wrote this book while working at the University of Barcelona, Spain on a ERC-​funded project coordinated by Susana Narotzky. The experience has profoundly shaped the anthropologist I am today, as well as the ways in which

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Acknowledgements

ix

I matured the concept, design and theoretical reflections of this book. I thank my fellow team members –​Stamatis Amarianakis, Carmen Leidereiter, Diana Sarkys, Giacomo Loperfido, Theodora Vetta, Jaime Palomera, Pati Homs and Antonio Maria Pusceddu –​for our productive discussions and work collaborations. I also thank Antonia Lima, Enzo Mingione, Dina Vaiou, Josep-​Antoni Ybarra, Mikel Aramburu and Silvia Bofill for sharing their knowledge of the history, economics and politics of Southern European societies. In particular, I am deeply thankful to Susana Narotzky for her constant support and generous encouragement in ensuring this book would see the light. I also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers at Manchester University Press, whose challenging comments and critical suggestions have helped make the book a better one. Special thanks to Thomas Dark, my editor, for his patience, support and constant availability. Beyond the confines of academic life, I thank my partner, Antonio; his daily care and labour of love give meaning and sustenance to our life struggles and endeavours. Last, but by no means least, I will always be deeply grateful to all the call centre operators who trusted me enough to let me intrude on their daily lives at work, and who were generous enough to share their lives outside it. I hope I have done some justice to their life labours and struggles for worth. This book is dedicated to my parents, the deepest of all absences.

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Abbreviations

ACD APCC CTI ECB EEC EU ICT IEFP IMF IVR LAN OECD PCP PSD PT SLA STCC TWA UGT

automatic call distributor Associação Portuguesa de Contact Centers computer telephony integration European Central Bank European Economic Community European Union information and communication technologies Instituto do Emprego e Formação Profissional International Monetary Fund interactive voice response local area network Organisation for Economic Co-​Operation and Development Portuguese Communist Party Partido Social Democrata Portugal Telecom service level agreement Sindicato dos Trabalhadores de Call Centers temporary work agency União Geral dos Trabalhadores

newgenprepdf

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Series editor’s foreword

When the New Ethnographies series was launched in 2011, its aim was to publish the best new ethnographic monographs that promoted interdisciplinary debate and methodological innovation in the qualitative social sciences. Manchester University Press was the logical home for such a series, given the historical role it played in securing the ethnographic legacy of the famous ‘Manchester School’ of anthropological and interdisciplinary ethnographic research, pioneered by Max Gluckman in the years following the Second World War. New Ethnographies has now established an enviable critical and commercial reputation. We have published titles on a wide variety of ethnographic subjects, including English football fans, Scottish Conservatives, Chagos islanders, international seafarers, African migrants in Ireland, post-​civil war Sri Lanka, Iraqi women in Denmark and the British in rural France, among others. Our list of forthcoming titles, which continues to grow, reflects some of the best scholarship based on fresh ethnographic research carried out all around the world. Our authors are both established and emerging scholars, including some of the most exciting and innovative up-​and-​coming ethnographers of the next generation. New Ethnographies continues to provide a platform for social scientists and others engaging with ethnographic methods in new and imaginative ways. We also publish the work of those grappling with the ‘new’ ethnographic objects to which globalisation, geopolitical instability, transnational migration and the growth of neoliberal markets have given rise in the twenty-​first century. We will continue to promote interdisciplinary debate about ethnographic methods as the series grows. Most importantly, we will continue to champion ethnography as a valuable tool for apprehending a world in flux. Alexander Thomas T. Smith Department of Sociology, University of Warwick

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1

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Introduction

In Portugal, from the mid-​2000s, the reality of call centre employment gradually became prominent in the public sphere. Albeit little was known about what tasks the work entailed, or how it was performed, there seemed to be little doubt about who was doing the work in the new factories of communication of late capitalist societies (Fernie and Metcalf 1998; Buscatto 2002). The media began characterising the call centre workforce as those belonging to the ‘500 euro generation’ (‘geração 500 euros’) –​a publicly sanctioned label used to designate highly qualified youngsters engaged in low-​paid, precarious, unprotected and socially disqualified forms of service work. Snapshots of call centre work began emerging with a significant regularity in reportage and newspaper columns. The call centre environment has been portrayed as consisting of endless rows of small cubicles, where a human agent endures the drudgery of repetitive and monotonous telephone conversations with angry and abusive clients, under invasive modes of technological surveillance, discipline and control. In 2011, the ‘500 euro generation’ was renamed as the ‘generation in trouble’ (‘geração á rasca’), an expression disseminated in a massive collective mobilisation called by a group of young activists against the intensification of neoliberal labour precarisation caused by austerity policies. Up until the present, with growing intensity, among ordinary people, academics, politicians and social activists, call centre work remains a striking symbol of labour precarity, a condition particularly associated with the neoliberal generational disenchantment that ‘each generation does better than its predecessor’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001: 17). In this book, I  explore the historically, relationally and morally embedded dimensions of labour precarity in the Portuguese call centre sector. Although the more abstract and totalising aspects of neoliberal precarity have captured the critical attention of academics, social movement activists and the wider public, there are few case studies available of sites of labour particular to this phase of capitalist economic restructuring. This book, grounded on a fine-​grained ethnographic analysis of the call centre labour process, addresses the intricate relationships between global neoliberal restructuring shifts, expressed in the increased ‘normalisation’ of labour precarity, and the situated and context-​bound specificities of the history of capitalist development in Portugal. The call centre sector’s architecture of

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2

Disciplined agency

value-​extraction is analysed through relational and moral structures of kin, generation and class, jointly shaping practices of recruitment and training, and the organisation of work. This book describes the emergence of a regime of disciplined agency within the Portuguese call centre sector: a regime centred on the disciplining and commodification of human agency, mobilised through the unique human quality of language, which is both a product and the producer of call centre operators’ intimate feelings of generational disenchantment and dispossession. In contrast to the transnational call centre sector, the vast majority of call centres in Portugal provide services to a national public. Nearly all call centre work is outsourced to temporary work agencies: companies that, within the space of ten-​to-​fifteen years, have specialised in ‘call and contact services’.1 According to the Benchmarking Report of the Associação Portuguesa de Contact Centers (Portuguese Association of Contact Centres; APCC), in 2008, 59 per cent of the companies that responded to the survey had their call centre services outsourced to temporary work agencies (APCC 2009: 97); in 2018 this number had risen to 78 per cent (APCC 2019). Some of the major companies providing call centre services in Portugal are multinationals providing temporary staff, including Adecco, Manpower, Teleperformance, Connecta Group and Kelly Services. Call centres are spread across various business activities, making it challenging to gather centralised statistical data to build up a general characterisation of the sector and its growth in the last decades. This notwithstanding, the growing media attention to the call centre sector, the existence of international reports and the yearly benchmarking reports carried out by APCC, enable us to capture the increasing expansion and main economic sectors of the industry. These data should be taken with caution, but they do highlight relevant tendencies of the sector.2 In 2018 it was estimated that between 80,000 and 100,000 people were working in more than 400 call centres in Portugal, corresponding to more than 1 per cent of the active national population.3 The growth of the sector has been constant from the early 2000s up to the present. It is estimated that the sector grew at a rate of 8 per cent per year from 2003 to 2007 (Cunha et  al. 2007: 24). In 2014, the European Contact Centre Benchmark indicated that the growth of call centre positions in Portugal had been superior to the European average, with an increase of 9 per cent in comparison with the previous year.4 The sector’s total turnover tripled between 2016 and 2017, estimated to be higher than €1 billion.5 A significant number of Portuguese call centres provide inbound services in the sectors of telecommunications, banking, insurances and utilities. The majority of call centres are still located in Lisbon and Porto, although the installation of call centres is rapidly decentralising to areas in the country’s interior (see Figure 1.1). Furthermore, while the vast majority of call centres provide services to the internal market, recent developments indicate an increase in call centres operating for the external market, whose services are provided in a range of languages.6 There is a tension running throughout this book that relates to an emphasis on the contingent historical, relational and moral dimensions of the condition of labour precarity in the Portuguese call centre sector, while insisting on its structural and material determinants. The spread of neoliberal economic doctrine and

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1.1  Distribution by region of the call centre sector, Portugal

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4

Disciplined agency

ideology has contributed to the reshaping of European economies and societies, thereby facilitating the expansion of precarious, insecure and unprotected forms of employment. Broader neoliberal capitalist patterns of economic restructuring and labour deregulation are taken into account. Nonetheless, I  do not assume these patterns a priori to be endowed with a totalising force and internal logic determining the nature and end-​result of neoliberal transitions in specific national contexts, and I do not conflate the driving forces of the global life of neoliberal restructuring processes with the contingent and context-​bound factors, historical specificity and moral relational structures of kin, class and generation, which mediate the condition, experience and politics of precarity in the Portuguese call centre sector. In this introduction I map the most relevant theoretical frameworks underpinning the analysis and main arguments developed in the following chapters. In the final two sections, I  present an outline of the book and briefly elaborate on the main motivations and methodologies guiding the study upon which the book is based. Neoliberal precarity as a historically and morally embedded reality In recent decades, the growth and expansion of precarious, unregulated, insecure and unprotected forms of employment across capitalist societies, in Europe and beyond, have often been analysed as an integral dimension of ongoing neoliberal restructuring processes within the economy and society. Neoliberal precarity is theorised as the outcome of patterns of flexible accumulation and the demise of the Fordist–​Keynesian economic and social compact (Harvey 1989, 2005). It is linked to the erosion of the ‘wage-​earning society’ –​a mode of social regulation, citizenship integration and belonging in the social body (Castel 2002) –​ and related to emergent valorisation processes and political collective subjects (Hardt and Negri 2000, 2005; Standing 2011, 2014). Two main bodies of work have significantly contributed to the academic and public diffusion of the precarity terminology: the works of Italian autonomist Marxists (e.g. Hardt and Negri 2000, 2005; Virno 1996; Lazzarato 1996), and those of the economist Guy Standing (2011, 2014). For Italian autonomist Marxists, neoliberal precarity is both a product and a producer of more profound shifts in the nature of global capitalism, indexing the dislocation of hegemonic sources of value and the emergence of emancipatory and classed-​based collective political subjects. The increased precarisation (casualisation) of employment relationships in capitalist societies is tied to a hegemonic shift from industrial labour to immaterial labour, defined as the ‘labour that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity’ (Lazzarato 1996: 132) –​ that is, labour that produces services, intangible goods. Immaterial labour is characterised by greater integration of information and communications technologies in the production process and affective labour (Hardt and Negri 2000: 292). The production of affective labour is not contained by the valorisation process at the level of production; it tends to extend beyond the walls of the workplace,

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Introduction

5

leading to the creation of communities and networks of human interaction and cooperation. That is: ‘cooperation is completely immanent to the labouring activity itself … Immaterial labour thus seems to provide the potential for a kind of spontaneous and elementary communism’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 294). From this, it follows that immaterial labourers (such as the Portuguese precariat working in call centres) have at least an emancipatory potential, given that they are not dependent on capital in order to establish cooperation. Thus, it is argued that the present hegemony of immateriality allows for the ‘becoming common of labour’ (Hardt and Negri 2005: 115), meaning that, despite the differences in labour regimes, ‘this becoming common’ will tend ‘to reduce the qualitative divisions within labour’, which is ‘the biopolitical condition of the multitude’ (114).7 While autonomist Marxists emphasise the ‘latent cooperative dimension’ of immaterial forms of labour and the ‘becoming common of labour’, Guy Standing (2011, 2014) emphasises the heterogeneity and lack of collective political agency among the precariat. According to Standing, the precariat emerged primarily as a consequence of neoliberal public policies –​particularly those that have increased labour market flexibility. The neoliberal rearrangement of the collective structures that sustain social life (the educational system, family life or the occupational system) has led to class fragmentation (Standing 2011: 7–​8) and the emergence of a global precariat. The precariat is defined as a class in the making (not yet a class for itself) because it possesses class and status characteristics. These include, a lack of citizenship rights; a lack of occupational identity; a lack of social memory acquired through a craft as the basis for a narrative of identity in the past, present and future; and a ‘truncated status’ or a ‘status discord’, illustrated through the example of individuals with a high level of formal education having to engage in low-​ paid and non-​prestigious jobs. The precariat also lacks the forms of labour security and protection derived from the dominant regime of industrial citizenship as it was implemented after the Second World War in Britain (Labourism) (Standing 2011: 10–​11). Finally, the precariat have a pattern of social income different from that of all other social groups: they are much more dependent on money wages and less able to rely on community support, or State or private benefits. Standing also suggests that nowadays the process of precarisation is analogous to the process of proletarianisation in the nineteenth century. The implicit assumption is that if, in the past, capital wanted to normalise full proletarianisation, today it wants to normalise precarious and unstable labour for everyone. Therefore, ‘to be precariatised is to be subject to pressures and experiences that lead to a precariat existence, of living in the present, without a secure identity or sense of development achieved through work and lifestyle’ (Standing 2011: 16). The work of Italian autonomist Marxists and Guy Standing is representative of a broader tendency in mainstream approaches to neoliberal precarity. These approaches tend to privilege the abstract and totalising properties of capitalist dynamics as engines of social change, with the consequent overestimation of ‘global’ forces, to the detriment of ‘local’ and contingent configurations arising from historicised institutions and contingent factors shaping human agency.8 Such theorisations of neoliberal precarity are underpinned by an overestimation

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6

Disciplined agency

of the role played by material forces and structural powers in shaping neoliberal developments, often by abstracting and dissociating the former from context, historical specificity and moral relational structures of meaning and action, along with the lines of kin, class and generation. In this book, I develop a historically and morally embedded enquiry into neoliberal transitions in Portuguese capitalism, by tracing its expression in a particular service labour regime, the call centre sector.9 My emphasis on the need to pursue a historically and morally embedded enquiry into neoliberal capitalist transitions aims to underline the explanatory relevance of attending to how global capitalist dynamics intersect with national historical realities, shaping the condition and politics of labour precarity within particular service labour regimes. In the following chapters, neoliberal precarity is explored through the examination of the particular trajectory and development of Portuguese flexible capitalism and how it shapes the condition, experience and politics of precarity in the contemporary call centre sector. I  consider specific historical ‘critical junctions’ (Kalb and Tak 2005) in the recent history of Portuguese capitalist development, relevant because of their enduring influence in shaping the consolidation of flexible patterns of accumulation and emergent intra-​generational life goals of upward class mobility towards middle-​class distinction. This historical incursion into the recent history of Portugal serves the purpose of making a dual interrelated argument, first, to specify how in Portugal historical contingent processes, as well as global processes of neoliberalisation, facilitated the growth of precarious forms of employment, particularly temporary agency work  –​the primary recruiter of labour power for the call centre sector. I  show how labour precarisation has been deployed by the State as an integral part of national projects of accumulation and development and the accommodation of global capitalist imperatives, even if embedded in distinct moral and ideological frameworks of legitimation. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries, an ingrained State-​led tradition of labour devaluation shaped the historically bounded context factors that facilitated the emergence and expansion of precarious labour regimes in the sector. Second, I  suggest that the specific shape of Portuguese flexible capitalism, together with the increasing precarity of employment and the deterioration of working conditions attached to the neoliberal turn in the 1980s, contributed to the intensification of a disjuncture in historically bounded generational expectations –​ to the breakdown and rupture of a relationally and morally embedded intra-​ generational-​livelihood model of ‘worthy living’ (Naroztky and Besnier 2014). The working-​class parental generations of today’s precarious call centre workers, enabled by State-​led projects of economic freedom, modernity and progress, projected upon their sons and daughters the hopes and aspirations towards middle-​class distinction, grounded on the achievement of higher-​educational credentials and the pursuit of protected, stable and socially valued white-​collar employment. For contemporary call centre workers, integration into a disqualified and socially devalued labour sector, typified and publicly sanctioned as the main icon of precarity, constitutes a ‘falling from grace’, a realisation of the unfulfilled social expectations of middle-​class distinction, which was laid upon them

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Introduction

7

by the State, the nation and their parental generation. As I show in this book, in the Portuguese setting, with particular incidence from the mid-​2000s onwards, and in the austerity conjuncture (2011–​14), the relational dimension of unfulfilled expectations across generations actively shaped the ambivalent character of the political status of the precarity terminology, torn between emancipatory possibilities and the threat of moral stigma tied to downward social mobility and social devaluation. The analysis of precarity that I develop throughout draws inspiration from a rich, growing anthropological literature that has set out to ‘provincialize universalizing claims about precarity by pointing to how the contemporary sensorium is culturally and historically mediated –​grounded in local vernaculars of labor, family, society, wealth, desire, and loss’ (Muehlebach 2013: 298). Anthropological approaches to precarity and precarisation processes productively address the tensions and ambivalences arising from the apparent disjuncture between precarity as a structural and ontological feature of the human condition (Butler 2004) and its historically and contextually bounded characteristics (Han 2018). In doing so, anthropological studies have expanded the theorisation of precarity as a multidimensional phenomenon embedded in particular histories, national trajectories and contingent structures of relationality. Anthropologists have examined the phenomenon of precarity as an affective and embodied condition entrenched in neoliberal State transitions of the economy and public policy (Molé 2011) and as a social and existential condition shaped by disconnection and human detachment, emerging from the cumulative impact of multiple precarities (of work, life, relations and sociality), which in post-​industrial Japan is prominently represented by the phenomenon of youngsters who choose to withdraw from social life (Allison 2013). More recently, Millar (2018) explores precarious livelihoods as a ‘form of living’ grounded on the material pursuit of livelihood resources and as a form of meaning and future-​making tied to particular projects and pursuits of the ‘good life’. This book contributes to expanding anthropological examinations of precarity by focusing on neoliberal precarity as a historically and morally embedded reality, rendered workable by State-​led accumulation and ideologies of development, mediated by contingent, relational structures of feeling, and enacted in a specific service labour regime. Call centre labour as a regime of disciplined agency The main activity of any call centre is to receive and/​or make phone calls. Call centres are distinguished according to management terminology between those that are ‘inbound’ (calls initiated by the client) and those that are ‘outbound’ (calls initiated by the operator). They pervade almost all areas of human activity, from telecommunications, banking, insurance and utilities, to call centres specifically designed for spiritual counselling. Since the mid-​1990s, call centres have provided the most dynamic area of growth in white-​collar employment internationally (Taylor and Bain 1999). According to Taylor and Bain (1999), call centre work is seen as containing elements that represent a further evolution in the deployment

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8

Disciplined agency

of Taylorist methods for the organisation of work with the aid of information and communication technologies (ICT). Indeed, the expansion of the call centre environment was made possible with the integration of telephone and computer technologies and put into effect with the creation of one specific technical device, the automatic call distributor (ACD). This device allows the distribution of calls to a specific group of people (terminals), itself part of a large technology that integrates interactions between a telephone and a computer, called ‘computer telephony integration’ (CTI). The early literature on call centres was mainly disseminated in the form of research articles, especially among UK-​based journals such as Work and Occupations and Work, Employment and Society. This literature was influenced by labour process theory (e.g. Taylor and Bain 1999; Bain and Taylor 2000; Bain et al. 2002): a methodological and analytical approach to the nature of labour deskilling and proletarianisation under capitalism inspired by Harry Braverman’s reassessment of Marx’s theory of the capitalist labour process. In his book Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974), Braverman examines the relationship between management systems of control and capitalism’s continuing need to overcome the ‘indeterminacy of labour power’. The ‘indeterminacy of labour power’ encompasses a distinctive feature of the capitalist labour process. Under capitalism, workers sell not themselves or their labour in the market, but rather their labour power, their capacity to labour, which is infinite in its potential but limited by the ‘subjective state of the worker’ (Braverman 1974: 39). According to Braverman, Taylor’s theory of scientific management, applied first in manufacturing production processes and later in service industries to tackle the indeterminacy of labour, established a new frontier of capitalist control, alienating workers from product, knowledge and control over the process of work (Taylor 1911). However, as noted by Ellis and Taylor (2006), the call centre was, for a long time, treated as a ‘disembodied entity’ –​that is, uncritically abstracted from the historical, local, economic and political contexts in which it operates –​and dissociated from the moral constitution of the subjectivity and consciousness of workers. More recent sociological and anthropological monographs on call centre work have started to correct this tendency. These works pay attention to the mutual constitution of global systemic capitalist patterns and contextual specificity, while mobilising call centre labour to investigate various themes, including: gendered patterns of social and physical mobility (Basi 2009; Patel 2010); the constitutive relationship between racialised, colonial histories and transnational service work (Mirchandani 2012), and deindustrialisation processes and the reshaping of working-​class identities and lifestyles (Lloyd 2013). Much of this work is centred in English-​speaking countries. A large number of studies on call centre labour, in distinct countries and economic sectors, report a fundamental contradiction attached to this kind of work. This fundamental contradiction, present to different degrees in all forms of service labour, refers to the conflicting requirements of singularisation (the focus on the individual needs of the client) and standardisation (bureaucratised speech acts, procedures and quantitative targets) demanded of operators in the course of

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Introduction

9

work. In call centres, under conditions of intense, technologically mediated forms of surveillance, operators are required to fulfil quantitative targets of work performance (e.g. number of calls answered per hour, maximum average time per call etc.) while also focusing on the qualitative dimension of their interactions with clients over the phone, including following conversation scripts and ‘showing a smile in one’s voice’. In the course of work, operators are subjected to tensions and ambivalences, resulting from having to build a caring relationship with the client while also being alert to the existence of average call-​time limitations. The dominant tendency in the call centre literature is to consider that the quantitative and qualitative contradictory work-​output requirements, together with advanced technologies of control and surveillance, lead to the disembedding, disembodiment, depersonalisation and de-​subjectification of human linguistic capabilities (e.g. Lloyd 2013; Aneesh 2015; Brophy 2017; Woodcock 2017). The increased discipline, control, governability and predictability in the uses of language capabilities within call centre work are connected with capitalism’s growing dependency for valorisation purposes on workers’ communicative capabilities (Brophy 2017). Accordingly, value-​extraction in the call centre labour process is governed by the standardisation and measurability of operators’ linguistic interactive engagements over the phone. The work emerges as a typical example of ‘top-​down talk’: a form of linguistic interaction within institutional and organisational settings in which the use of language is subject to prescriptions of standardisation and regulation that tend to erase the agentive linguistic capabilities of the participants (Cameron 2008; see also Cameron 2000). From the outset of my fieldwork, I became aware of the extent to which the quality–quantity conundrum shaped the work process and the workers’ performance. Invasive, technologically mediated devices of control, discipline and surveillance are prominent in the workplace environment. Operators have to abide by quantitative work targets, and they also have to follow qualitative prescriptions of rapport and empathy-​building with clients. Team-​leaders routinely perform evaluations of the operators’ calls, which implies listening to their calls live or to any of the many calls recorded and stored in the computer database. However, while I was shadowing operators’ telephone interactions with clients, one pattern became ever more apparent:  their successful client engagements were often not the result of the applications of the rules and procedures established by the company but rather stemmed from operators’ strategies of improvisation, creativity and imagination. Answering an unforeseen client query, fulfilling an unpredictable request, catering to the emotional state of an angry client or understanding a client’s description of a technical malfunction: all required that operators be able to anticipate, imagine, conceptualise and evaluate. The paradox to which I was consistently exposed was that despite the invasive and systematic apparatus of control and surveillance, what ensured that operators could overcome the quality–quantity conundrum and deal effectively with the object of their work (the clients) was precisely what seemed to be expropriated from operators and eroded: their agency. The apparent robotisation of operators, the weakening of their subjectivity and the alienation of their individuality

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10

Disciplined agency

through computerised means of surveillance and control seemed to be concealing and obscuring the role played by human agency, expressed through the medium of language, in the service of the pursuit of profit.10 In this book, I suggest that the call centre labour process represents an advanced system of labour exploitation  –​not only because of the technologically aided devices of control and forms of scripted Taylorism aimed at directing, measuring, quantifying and standardising workers’ linguistic interventions. I theorise that the call centre labour process is a regime of disciplined agency, in which the maintenance of the tension between quantitative and qualitative work-​output targets enables the incorporation within the valorisation process of operators’ moral, relational and socially embedded agentive linguistic capacities of creative improvisation, decision-​making, problem-​solving and ethical evaluation. Throughout, I  disclose the institutionalisation of this regime of disciplined agency by highlighting how structural dynamics of the call centre labour process are articulated with specificities of Portuguese neoliberal precarity. The analysis I develop is one in which capitalist value extraction and the commodification of the labouring subject are not dissociated from historically, contextually and morally bound dispositions, connections and relations. That is, the alienable dimensions of labour power are not dissociated from their inalienable historically and morally contingent features.11 Mirchandani (2012) suggests that call centre operators in the transnational Indian call centre sector perform a large quantity of invisible labour, designated as ‘authenticity work’. This involves the adoption of behaviours and modes of performance with the ultimate aim of enacting a working self over the phone that simultaneously transmits a feeling of familiarity and distance to customers in the UK or the USA. Workers have to act as ‘authentic clones’; their performance over the phone has to express the traditionally embedded mode of servitude associated with a legitimate colonial subject, but they also need to convey a sense of professionalism and entrepreneurialism connected with a flexible labour force. Call centre ‘phone clones’ have to be familiar and distant at the same time. Mirchandani’s notion of authenticity work implicitly stresses the role played by operators’ agentive capabilities in the reconciliation of contradictory cultural logics and hierarchical historical legacies pervading the interactions between operators and clients. My theorisation of the call centre labour process as a regime of disciplined agency follows on from Mirchandani’s (2012) insightful analysis, with an emphasis on the commodification of human creativity, improvisation capacities and agentive skills. The stress I place on the neglected role of human creativity and linguistic agency in the call centre labour process is not meant to suggest that this form of work is characterised by a diminished degree of exploitation where workers are endowed with a greater sense of autonomy and discretion over the product, process and knowledge of the work. Instead, my aim is the opposite. I suggest that call centres present an advanced system of labour exploitation that is able to appropriate a particularly raw form of human labour power: the relational and moral properties of human agency, expressed through the unique human quality of language.

11

Introduction

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The ways in which the system of disciplined agency is able to intensify the value market exchange of such inherent human qualities is indirectly proportional to the moral devaluation of labourers in terms of their sense of dignity and worth. The call centre apparatus of value extraction appropriates from workers precisely the dimensions of their livelihoods, within and beyond the workplace, of which they feel dispossessed:  their capacity and entitlement to be socially recognised as autonomous, independent, valued and worthy agents, in line with the aspirations and expectations nurtured by themselves, their parents and the nation. Overview of chapters The analysis laid out in this book departs from a historical examination of the way the neoliberal economic restructuring of Portuguese capitalism shaped the emergence of the call centre sector. I progress through the ascendancy of call centres as icons of precarity in contemporary Portugal, and the specific features of the call centre labour process that configure a new form of commodification of the labouring subject. Finally, I engage in a discussion of the particular subjectivities and forms of moral dispossession attached to the value-​extraction system of ‘disciplined agency’ deployed in call centre labour, and how they are facilitated by relationally and morally embedded structures of kin, generation and class. Chapter  2 underlines the historical continuities and transitions of the Portuguese setting that have shaped the emergence of the call centre sector, taking into account broader shifts and tendencies in global capitalism. I situate the trajectories of my interviewees’ parents in this historical landscape by addressing how the social aspirations of upward class mobility that they have projected on their children were embedded in national projects of freedom, modernity and economic progress. The aim of the chapter is twofold. First, it shows how the affinity between precarious labour and call centre employment in Portugal is as much an outgrowth of recent Portuguese economic history as it is the result of global processes of neoliberalisation. Second, it emphasises how the increasing precariousness of employment and deterioration of working conditions attached to the neoliberal turn in the 1980s have made it increasingly difficult for contemporary call centre workers to achieve the social expectations of middle-​class distinction, based on educational achievement and stable employment, that were placed on them by the State, the nation and their parental generation. This chapter unravels how particular, historically bounded, intra-​generational life goals of class mobility become embedded in broader transitions within economic and labour regimes. Chapter 3 examines further the theme of unfulfilled generational expectations for those working in call centres by exploring how the work came to assume the iconic role of the main symbol of precarity in Portugal. A brief discussion is offered on the emergence of the precarity terminology, and the associated category of the precariat, in the context of European social movements of struggle and activism. This provides the reader with a general view of the phenomenon of precarious work and the particular form of its development in Portugal. In the remainder of the chapter I focus on the contested politics and morality of the call centre sector.

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Disciplined agency

In contrast to perspectives that have emphasised either the novel or the structural character of the condition of precarity, I stress that in Portugal the moral, political and ideological discourses in which the categories of precarity, precarious labour and the precariat are embedded can be a source of both emancipation and stigma. In Chapters  4 to 6 I  concentrate on examining how the specific shape of Portuguese flexible capitalism, the disjuncture in historically bounded generational expectations (addressed in Chapter 2), and the tensions attached to the cultural and social meanings of precarity are expressed in the call centre labour process. I progressively unravel the institutionalisation of a system of labour exploitation that I designate as a regime of disciplined agency. Chapter 4 explores how call centres present their hiring, recruitment, training and job allocation practices to job applicants. The set of organisational processes through which young recruits ‘learn to be a call centre operator’ are grounded on specific procedures that establish particular modes of conduct and behaviour that organise and discipline subjectivities in the early stages of employee training. The hiring, recruitment, training and job allocation processes, built upon the moral-​laden nationally institutionalised employment conditions of uncertainty and powerlessness become fundamental mechanisms through which workers’ selves and skills are linguistically and practically constructed as containers of subordination and agency. In Chapter 5 I consider the manufacture of client sovereignty within call centres, how it shapes the nature of the operator–​client relationship and how it contributes to the overall specificity of call centre labour as a regime of disciplined agency. The client, as a figure of authority, shapes the way in which labour as service is mobilised within the sector. Intending to promote the everyday elaboration of client sovereignty, firms engage in extensive marketing operations and ritualised collective gatherings that serve to manufacture what I call the ‘transcendent client’. On the shop floor, the morally embedded nature of operator–​client interactions mediates the conditions in and against which the ideology of the transcendent client comes to be accommodated or challenged by operators. One particular form of contestation that takes place on the shop floor involves transforming the ‘transcendent client’ into the ‘stupid client’, through gossip, humour and rumours. In Chapter  6 I  examine how discipline, quantification and surveillance are enacted within the labour process in order to clarify the main distinguishable characteristic of the nature of value-​creation within call centres. The computer-​ based mechanisms used in the call centre sector for measuring labour output and the informal and formal strategies of labour surveillance contain one central paradox that is indispensable for profit maintenance:  workers have to execute their work according to quantitative and qualitative targets of productivity. By following these two prescribed models of work, management attains two goals: making workers accountable for their work performance, and yet inciting them to intervene agentially in the labour process through linguistic engagement. In other words, call centres present the most advanced system for the exploitation of a rarefied form of human labour: linguistic engagement or human communicative competence. The call centre labour process emerges as a regime of disciplined agency, in which the maintenance of the tension between quantitative

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13

and qualitative work outputs targets enables the incorporation within the valorisation process of operators’ morally and socially embedded agentive linguistic capacities of decision-​making, problem-​solving and ethical evaluation. In Chapter  7 I  concentrate mainly on workers’ reports about their sense of dispossession, shame and stigma. The chapter is based on semi-​biographical interviews with forty call centre workers. I focus on three main aspects: how the uncertainty and vulnerability attached to precarious labour is experienced as dispossession and how this is connected with the experience of downward mobility (‘falling from grace’); social isolation in personal relationships and feelings of shame towards the family; and the interpretation of the stigma attached in Portuguese society to call centre operators. I argue that these have an important impact on how agents constitute their subjectivity and consciousness. Workers’ accounts of their circumstances reveal a considerable degree of insight into what exactly it is about the workplace and the conditions of work that produces such a profound sense of disenchantment. Fieldwork, methods and positionality (and a clarification about motivation) This book is based on fieldwork conducted between August 2007 and January 2009 in a call centre belonging to a private-​sector telecommunications company in Lisbon. The company, which I will call EVA, was created in 1994 and is a sub-​ holding company for the telecommunications, media and software systems integration areas of a multi-​industry company. The call centre in which I conducted fieldwork provides technical support for the corporate segment of clients. Around forty-​five operators and three team leaders are contracted through an agency for temporary work, and the coordinators are hired directly through EVA. In addition to the interviews with operators, the fieldwork involved semi-​structured interviews with members of trade unions, employers’ associations and anti-​ precarity social movements as well as historical analysis of secondary material and media analysis. The original empirical material upon which this book is grounded was further expanded by research undertaken in Portugal during 2015 and 2016 in the midst of the ongoing effects of the austerity adjustment program sponsored by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and implemented between 2011 and 2014.12 Doing so enabled me to update the ongoing relevance of my original empirical findings and analytical arguments, particularly regarding the continuing role of call centre work as the main symbol of precarity through shifting political-​ economic conjunctures (i.e. during the inception of the 2008 financial crisis and the austerity conjuncture).13 The specificities of the site shaped my fieldwork. I refer to them because they are instructive with regard to spatiality, trust and social relations in call centres; they are closed workspaces that tend to be ‘out of sight’. In most circumstances, the buildings where the call centres operate are not known to the public (neither is access permitted), and operators are not allowed to reveal their location to clients. Security guards monitor and control who enters. Beside the vigilance exerted over

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Disciplined agency

labour through the technical infrastructure of the call centre, its particular geography tends to homogenise movements and condition the relations established among the people inside. If someone is not involved in routine operations, therefore, they are noted, talked about and observed. In short: no-​one is invisible inside a call centre (except the clients). And such was also the case with me, although I had some illusions before beginning fieldwork that this would not happen. My first strategy for getting into a call centre was to contact the temping agencies that recruit such staff. I asked if I could work as a call centre operator for one year for the sole purposes of my research. More than twenty agencies answered that this was not possible given the strict confidentiality of clients’ data, as well as their business practices. Furthermore, they all emphasised that the call centre buildings belong not to them but to the user firm (i.e. the company contracting the services of the temping agency), and that I should therefore contact the user firms directly. I then started to do so, first by email, then by letter and finally by phone. I had an affirmative answer from a private telecommunications company that had been one of my primary ‘targets’. They had several technical support units and, for reasons that I  explain further below, I  was particularly interested in conducting fieldwork in a technical, rather than a commercial, call centre. After receiving this company’s response I had an initial meeting with the area coordinator where I explained the main purposes of the research. I was asked about the methods I was going to use, with whom I would need to talk and for how long. A week later I was informed by email that a letter from my university was needed in order to verify the ‘truthfulness’ of my intentions. I was finally authorised to begin research after this letter arrived, and I started by following a group of recruits. I had to negotiate and justify my presence constantly while inside, both to management and to workers. The management demanded that I ask their permission to listen to calls between operators and clients and to attend team meetings, training sessions and recruitment interviews. Listening to calls was fully permitted, but I  was not allowed to record them. My presence in team meetings, training sessions and interviews was conditionally permitted; that is, I had to ask every time there was some specific situation where I thought I should be present. I had to assure workers that I was not interested in getting a position inside the company, and that my research had not been commissioned by the company with the intent of studying the workers (these were all aspects I  was directly asked about). After around five months one of the operators came to me and told me in private: ‘I owe you one’, to which I replied ‘Why do you say that?’. He said, ‘You know, after giving you the interview I  began thinking about my life and all the years I  have wasted inside this call centre … if it wasn’t for you that would not have happened. This year I  am going to try entering university again. If it wasn’t for you …’. Before this comment, I already had the intuition that neutrality was something I was never going to achieve. After it, I realised it was something I did not want to achieve. Many times my presence served to mitigate the demands made of operators by team-​leaders, and even the tone of voice used by managers when talking to them. I  was completely aware of that, and I  used the small parcel of

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Introduction

15

symbolic capital I had to protect the operators whenever I could, but without putting their position at risk. I spent eight hours a day inside the call centre, five days a week, on morning, afternoon or evening shifts. I followed operators, team-​leaders, the team coordinator and the area coordinator. I could not answer or make phone calls, but I could help with small tasks: taking copies, helping operators while they were on calls, getting them coffee or water, taking minutes from the team-​meetings, helping with the preparation of training sessions, receiving and storing equipment sent by clients. Also, and most importantly, I was someone to whom operators and team-​ leaders could talk in the small intervals between one call and the next while I was following their work, as well as while they were smoking, on a break or having their meals. With time I began to be invited to ‘LAN parties’,14 team dinners and other activities outside the workplace, and after a while operators and team-​leaders began to make comments such as ‘When is Patricia going to answer a phone call? She has to answer a phone call!’. It is common in call centres for recruits to be subjected to a kind of rite of passage. A senior operator is supposed to call the line of a ‘freshman’ and pretend to be an irate client. After this, the recruit becomes ‘one of the guys’. No matter how much I was able to gain the trust from operators and team-​leaders I was never ‘one of the guys’. Not only because I was not a ‘guy’, but also because I never answered that or any other phone call. On the part of management, however, the attitude towards me changed over time in the opposite direction. During the period I was conducting my fieldwork there happened to be an unusually large flow of news from the media drawing attention to call centres where unacceptable practices of labour exploitation were taking place, where workers had to follow a military regime for the sake of the company’s profit. It was also noted that user firms were deploying illicit strategies in order to avoid obeying laws relating to temporary labour forces. Taking this into account, in addition to my good relations with the operators and team-​leaders, managers began to apply a strategy of indifference towards me, acting as if I were not present, not greeting me and sometimes asking me to leave meeting rooms. By means of several other strategies they also covertly attempted to persuade operators and team-​leaders that maybe my presence was not helpful. However, every attempt at this was unsuccessful, and that is the reason why I was not forced to finish my fieldwork earlier than planned. More importantly, what these episodes reveal is the degree of suspicion among the workforce, particularly among casual and permanent workers –​i.e. between operators, team-​leaders and management. The dependent/​vulnerable employment conditions of all those involved in the work makes trust very hard to achieve. This is common in other call centres I came to know during my personal trajectory before beginning my doctoral research in 2006. In 2000, I started working part-​time in a call centre in Lisbon as an operator on a commercial helpline run by a telecommunications company. Initially, my shift was from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., but while working at the call centre I changed to other shifts: from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m. and also from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. After five years working as an operator I was promoted to team-​leader, and in 2006 I quit my job to start

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16

Disciplined agency

my Ph.D. studies in London. When I started working at the call centre my goal was not to conduct any research on the call centre industry: it was merely a job and a way of earning a salary. In 2000, the industry was growing tremendously in Portugal, following what was happening in other countries in Europe, the USA and India. From June 2003 onwards I decided to pursue an informal research project about emotional labour, control and surveillance in the call centre labour process. Such research was supported by the adoption of a previous theoretical and conceptual framework, and later it assumed a more formal shape that became the basis of my Ph.D. proposal. Until September 2006 I continued to collect empirical data about the day-​to-​day organisation of work in the call centre. As the project became more clearly formulated, it was still marked by a preoccupation (perhaps familiar to all anthropologists, to a greater or lesser extent) about my simultaneous distance from and closeness to the site of my fieldwork. Having opted to conduct anthropological research in a familiar setting, I  knew that awareness of this issue would have to be taken into account. However, at the same time, I could not avoid thinking that I had been in an ‘insider position’ that might benefit and enrich, from the standpoint of participant-​observation, the study of the topics I have delineated. It gave me a social memory that was an important guide for the fieldwork later on. I emphasise social, because it is based on an embodied knowledge that, though autobiographical, is simultaneously interpersonal, and as such finds similarities and contrasts with the experience of ‘others’ (Okely 1992: 8). I never told my informants that I had previously worked in a call centre; I was afraid that they would reply ‘Well, if you have worked for so many years in a call centre why do you need us?’. Today I am still not sure if this omission was the right decision or not. Nevertheless, I  am certain that my omissions are not as important as the ones deployed by the research participants during fieldwork –​ omissions that I could easily detect given my previous full participation in what was first my work-​field and later my fieldwork site. Having said this, it could be deduced that the main motivation for this book had been my previous working experience in a call centre. And this is partly true, but only partly. In his posthumous book, Sketch for a Self-​Analysis, Pierre Bourdieu (2007) writes an epigraph glossing the sentence Magritte uses in one of his paintings: ‘This is not an autobiography’. I would say the same regarding this book, but I would also add that ‘to understand is first to understand the field with which and against which one has been formed’ (Bourdieu 2007: 4). The search for understanding was my main motivation. Notes 1 The use of the term ‘outsourcing’ throughout this book does not involve the externalisation of business services to other countries but only to external providers within the same country. 2 In 2019 the more up-​to-​date quantitative data of the call centre sector in Portugal are those focusing on the evolution of the sector in 2016, 2017 and 2018 (APCC 2019, 2018).

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3 See https://​docs.wixstatic.com/​ugd/​43c603_​77827bf29ad1449c893a6eb3108374c0.pdf (accessed January 2020). 4 See www.callcentermagazine.net/​contact-​centers/​emprego-​em-​centros-​de-​contacto-​ em-​portugal-​tem-​crescido-​acima-​da-​media-​europeia/​ (accessed January 2020). 5 See www.dn.pt/​pais/​interior/​call-​centers-​o-​faroeste-​do-​atendimento-​vai-​enfim-​ter-​lei-​ 10682403.html (accessed January 2020). 6 These developments are further detailed in Chapter 3. 7 This brief summary on immaterial labour as a register of neoliberal precarity represents a recent development by authors coming from an Italian workerist and autonomist tradition. It is not my aim to suggest that they are representative of the Marxist-​based workerist tradition that emerged in Italy in the 1960s. Indeed, workerism –​a literal translation of operaismo –​emerged at a particular ‘critical junction’ (see Kalb and Tak 2005) of Italian industrialisation following the post-​Second World War reconstruction and ensuing ‘economic miracle’. One specific aspect distinguishing current post-​autonomist theorisations of changes in labour and the labour movement from those that were initially formulated by authors such as Mario Tronti and Romano Alquati resides precisely in how these authors paid attention to the raw and crude empirical materials arising from workers’ experiences and viewpoints concerning the work dynamics within industrial workplaces. The latter became known as co-​ricerca (workers’ enquiry), a methodology focused on unravelling workers’ understandings and behaviours concerning class struggles at the point of production with the explicit goal of using it for projects of political and social transformation; Wright (2002) provides an interesting historical and contextual analysis of the emergence and development of the workers’ enquiry methodology in Italian operaismo. There have been a modest number of attempts to replicate, or draw inspiration from, the workers’ enquiry methodology in the call centre sector, both from activist collectives (Kolinko 2002) and in academia (Woodcock 2017; Brophy 2017). 8 Some of the critiques of the precarity terminology and the concept of the precariat include Federici (2008), Munck (2013), Breman (2013) and Palmer (2014). 9 The anthropological concept of embeddedness draws inspiration from the work of Karl Polanyi, an author who had a decisive role in the history of economic anthropology (Hann and Hart 2011). Polanyi (2001 [1944]) deploys the notion of embeddedness to articulate a critique of market dominance and utilitarian reason. His historicisation of the rise of the market economy in nineteenth-​century England shows that the emergence of the market society was accomplished through the disembeddedness of economic relationships from social, cultural and political spheres not strictly economic (e.g. kinship, customs, values, traditions, institutions, religion; see Polanyi (1968)). The broader insight underpinning the notion of embeddedness –​that economies are embedded in history, cultural idioms and moral relational structures of meaning and action (such as kin, class, gender or generation) –​has retained a profound influence in critical anthropological substantivist approaches to the economy and economic restructuring processes. 10 Here I am drawing on Michael Burawoy’s analytical premise of ‘obscuring and securing surplus value’ (1979; see also 1978), as the distinctive feature of the dilemma of capitalist control in the labour process. Burawoy examined what he considered to be the main shortcomings of Braverman’s (and Marx’s) account of the nature of control in the capitalist labour process. He disputed Braverman’s focus on Taylor’s separation of conception and execution as the fundamental structure of capitalist control, stressing instead that the essential feature of the capitalist labour process is ‘obscuring and securing surplus

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Disciplined agency

value’:  the process by which capital conceals the existence of a surplus, while also investing in maintaining the necessary ideological and regulatory conditions to secure the production of a surplus. Burawoy insisted that the process by which capitalists engage in ‘obscuring and securing of surplus value’ (Burawoy 1979) cannot be accessed by focusing only on the side of the object (i.e. capital), as did Braverman, but requires addressing the subjective state of the worker, which includes examining the ideological, political and economic dimensions of the work process. Analysing how labour power is translated into actual labour requires, therefore, taking into account the objective and subjective factors that structure the conditions through which capitalist control is operationalised. 11 In a recent examination of the usefulness of the concept of labour for anthropological research, Narotzky (2018) highlights that ‘even in a context dominated by capitalist relations, human labour is never fully disembedded. In fact, following commodity chains, we can observe that the alienable aspect of labour, what makes it exploitable in a particular way, always depends on its inalienable ties to the social environment’ (5). This perspective destabilises hasty separations between the concrete and abstract dimensions of labour, the incommensurable and commensurable dimensions of value, stressing instead their variable and uneven historically contingent mutual constitution. Narotzky’s incisive remark resonates with earlier sociological and anthropological work, focused on capitalist manufacturing and service labour processes, which has sought to critique and problematise the ahistorical, deterministic and totalising properties of Braverman’s theorisation of the capitalist labour process. Specifically, since Michael Burawoy’s critique, an important body of ethnographically based monographs have detailed how capital’s logic of control and value extraction is articulated with historical and relational configurations of kinship, gender, sexuality and class, both on the assembly line and in the service workplace (see, for instance, Ong 1987; Freeman 2000; Salzinger 2003; Sherman 2007). In different ways, these works dispute the premise that Taylorist methods of labour control involve the complete removal of workers’ agency and decision-​making capabilities, and challenge the premise that Taylorism in practice involves a monopoly of all knowledge necessary to the successful conduct of the labour process and value production. That is, they show that the Taylorist ideological aim of treating human beings as machines is not only a limitation to valorisation purposes; it is also a historical and empirical impossibility. 12 This research was conducted in the context of the ERC-​funded project ‘Grassroots Economies:  Meaning, Project and Practice in the Pursuit of Livelihood’, based at the University of Barcelona,under the coordination of Susana Narotzky. See www.ub.edu/​ grassrootseconomics/​(accessed January 2020). 13 These are aspects explored particularly in Chapter 3 and in the conclusion. 14 A ‘LAN party’ is a gathering of persons with computers connected in order to establish a ‘local area network’ (LAN) in which computer games are played.

2

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Capitalist and generational transitions in contemporary Portugal

Portugal: questão que eu tenho comigo mesmo, golpe até ao osso, fome sem entretém, perdigueiro marrado e sem narizes, sem perdizes, rocim engraxado, feira cabisbaixa, meu remorso, meu remorso de todos nós … Portugal: an ongoing discussion with myself, a soreness to the bone, an unrelenting hunger, an attentive bloodhound with no nose and no ducks, a spruced-​up nag, a dingy fair, my regret, my regret for us all … Alexandre O’Neill, 1965 (translation mine)

The global qualities of the call centre sector are prominent in popular and academic accounts of its nature, emergence and expansion. The most familiar image of a call centre is that of endless rows of white cubicles, where typically Indian call centre agents, located in an unknown location, provide information and commercial services over the phone to Anglo-​American markets. Academics often explain the rise of the call centre sector in the twentieth century through one or a combination of the following developments: the neoliberal restructuring of labour and employment relationships; the integration of telephone and computer technologies; the global servitisation of the economy; and, finally, the rise of the customer as king rhetoric and practice in management theory (Basi 2009; Mirchandani 2012; Aneesh 2015; Woodcock 2017). Jamie Woodcock’s 2017 account, based on six months of undercover research in the sales department of a British call centre, is illustrative in this regard. In response to the question ‘Where did call centres came from?’, emphasis is given to the decisive emergence of the ACD, the spread of

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Disciplined agency

neoliberal ideology and the unstoppable capitalist search for new realms of value extraction (Woodcock 2017: 11–​15).1 Either intentionally or unintentionally, call centre scholarship tends to privilege a portrait of the sector as the end-​result of global, external and disembedded economic and political processes. Yet presenting it thus is at odds with one of the most representative quantitative transnational studies of the sector. The Global Call Center Report, covering 2,500 call centres in 17 countries, provides revealing facts about the industry’s development (Holman et al. 2007); contrary to the idea that outsourcing is a crucial feature of the sector (arising from the public visibility that India gained through the media), 86 per cent of call centres serve their local and regional market. Although call centres might represent a paradigmatic case of the globalisation of service work, evidence also shows a ‘remarkably national face’ in terms of work organisation and employment conditions (Weiss 2007). The role played by global processes and structural dynamics in the successful emergence of the call centre sector, in various geographies and national contexts, should not be underestimated. However, privileging the whole as an explanation for the part neglects how differentiated national histories, scales and moral structures of sentiment mediate the experience and meaning of the act of labour within call centres. This book offers a different portrait of the emergence, expansion and politics of the call centre sector through the Portuguese case. Developed in the following chapters, it is one in which the structural analysis of exploitation (i.e. the conditions under which surplus value is extracted within the labour process) does not preclude a critical historical-​realist approach along the lines of status, generation and class, but rather can be illuminated through it.2 Such an approach allows us to observe the conditions that might facilitate or prevent the fit between specific labour forces and labour regimes within a particular economic and political-​historical setting. It also allows us to specificy how and why labour takes the form it does, and what its human consequences are. This is especially relevant in the call centre sector, where profitability is ensured through the commodification of human agency. The latter is a source of value, not in spite of but because of its social and moral embeddedness in historical realities of kin, class and generation, and national economic transitions. This chapter addresses the historical continuities and transitions of the Portuguese setting that have shaped and facilitated the emergence of the call centre sector, taking into account broader shifts and tendencies in global capitalism. It addresses three historical conjunctures that have been instrumental in shaping the mutual constitution of State-​led projects of development and accumulation, and emergent intra-​generational normative livelihood models and projects: the dictatorship of Estado Novo (‘New State’, 1933–​74), the Carnation Revolution (25 April 1974)  and the joining of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1986.3 I locate the trajectories and aspirations of the parental generation of today’s precarious call centre workers in this historical landscape, as a way of accounting for the expectations of upward social mobility based on stable employment, educational achievement and middle-​class status that they cast upon their sons and daughters.

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The following analysis shows how in Portuguese reality, the emergence and expansion of a precarious call centre labour regime is as much a product of contingent historical processes, embedded in particular ideological frameworks and national projects of development, as it is the result of global processes of neoliberalisation. The precarity experienced by contemporary young call centre labourers is an acute expression of the material and moral generational dispossession tied to the breakdown of social mobility expectations, particularly from the 1980s onwards, following the intensification of the neoliberal deterioration of working conditions. Today’s call centre labour regime and labourers’ unfulfilled middle-​class aspirations illustrate how particular, historically grounded and contingent generational expectations become embedded within broader transitions in economic and labour regimes. The reality of necessity and the articulation of hope Portugal’s emergence as a member of the EU is shaped by specific features, including more than forty years under Fascist rule. The Estado Novo regime was a dictatorship that promoted a protectionist and nationalist strategy of economic development. This implied suppressing labour channels of dissent through a corporatist structure and sustaining patterns of extreme labour exploitation, while simultaneously assuming a paternalistic position vis-​à-​vis labour in order to contain the ‘excesses’ of a free-​market economy. Under the aegis of the economic expansion after the Second World War, the Estado Novo regime introduced developmental measures, enabling the growth of ‘pockets of Fordism’ in some economic sectors and geographic areas. This led to changes in the consumption patterns and expectations of class mobility in parts of the population. Estado Novo contributed to a tradition of labour devaluation, the presence of which I would encounter while conducting fieldwork in the contemporary call centre sector, while it was also the background against which the parents of today’s call centre workers articulated their hopes of a better life across generations. During the Estado Novo, the market and the right to private property were considered as central to economic organisation. However, within a framework of protectionist economic nationalism, the modern institutions of a market economy were linked to possible negative consequences in the relations between capital and labour. They could potentially disrupt images of the nation traditionally cherished by the regime and its allied classes (e.g. the conservative rural oligarchy) as an ‘essentially rural country’, or ‘poor, but honoured and honest’. In 1931, the Law of condicionamento industrial (industrial conditioning) was established as a means of subordinating investments in industry to prior approval  –​acquired through a complex bureaucratic system –​from the central State. Condicionamento industrial did not remain unchanged throughout the regime, but it contributed significantly to a deficient industrialisation process shaped by strong State intervention according to the particular conjuncture of interests (Lucena 1976). Corporativismo (corporatism) is implemented through the non-​democratic constitution of 1933. Its bases were inscribed in the Estatuto do Trabalho Nacional

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(National Labour Statute) of the same year.4 Portuguese corporativismo allowed the State to be omnipresent in all economic activity. Individuals, households and families should only produce for the common good, through inclusion in an organisation approved by the State. The system had a pyramidal structure. At the base there were State-​ruled unions defined as grémios (guilds), in the middle the professional federations and on top of the pyramid the corporations. This corporatist structure primarily aimed to regulate and control conflicts between capital and labour through State labour courts, thereby abolishing the right to strike and concealing any visible form of class struggle. The Estatuto do Trabalho Nacional advocated a planned State policy of low salaries that benefited both the rural oligarchy and the privileged ‘captains of industry’ (Rosas 1998:  78). The latter could benefit from constant profit maximisation without having to provide professional training to workers, enact land reform or ensure the technical modernisation of the means of production, leading some authors to speak of ‘industrialisation without an agrarian reform’ (Pereira 1979). The rural and industrial oligarchy could profit from paying wages below the costs of labour power reproduction owing to the maintenance of a ‘model of semi-​ proletarianization’ (Cabral 1979:  161). The majority of factory and rural wage labourers had to increase their income in order to subsist by mobilising family labour in small family agricultural or artisanal production.5 Although corporatism stated that ‘the normal necessities of production and enterprises should have priority over the needs of workers’ (Ferreira 1975: 10), the regime did not wish social conflicts to erupt as a consequence of the excesses of capitalist entrepreneurs, either in the factory or in the fields. Therefore, the corporatist State intervened, fixing working hours, imposing collective labour agreements and setting minimum wages in some economic sectors (Patriarca 1994). These two facets of Portuguese corporatism (repression and paternalism) vis-​à-​ vis labour were intended to sustain the stability of a regime in which the majority of the population not only lacked essential civil liberties (access to education, speech and freedom, as well as cultural repression and censorship) but also faced extremely harsh living conditions, shaped by chronic malnutrition and hunger. Despite Portugal’s policy of neutrality, this stability would suffer its severe first crisis as a result of the damaging economic and social effects of the Second World War, leading to strikes protesting against hunger and low factory wages, and to rural workers rioting in the fields in the 1940s (Raby 1988). From the 1930s until the 1950s, the orientating economic principles described reinforced the maintenance of a ‘dual society’ (Nunes 1964) marked by the coexistence of both traditionalist and modern ways of living. The vast majority of the population were engaged in a stagnant agricultural sector that lacked investment to modernise, and a small minority lived in coastal cities and worked in a slowly developing industrial sector that was poor and used backward technologies. Portuguese society was also ‘homogeneous and non-​plural’ (Martins 1998). Importantly, it was a society marked by a high degree of ethnic, linguistic and cultural cohesion existing within a rigid class system where a small upper class maintained strong links of identification with the political elite through the

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co-​optation of the institutions (i.e. the military and the universities) necessary for their reproduction.6 Following the Second World War, Portugal underwent significant economic and social structural changes. The regime put into effect a renewed impetus towards industrialisation, progressive market liberalisation and the opening of the country to foreign capital.7 The rural exodus to the newly industrialised coastal cities and increased job opportunities in the industrial and service sectors led to shifts in the distribution of the labour force across economic sectors, as well as in terms of lifestyle and consumption habits. Numbers working in agriculture decreased,8 while those working in the manufacturing and extractive industries, as well as in the service sectors connected to the modernisation of society, increased.9 Changes in lifestyles and attitudes, in part facilitated by growing access to television and radio, mainly since the 1950s, as well as moderate wage increases, had an impact on consumption habits. For instance, the consumption of meat, milk, eggs and fruit increased, while that of cereal crops (rye, barley and rice) and potatoes, which had been characteristic of the traditional national diet, decreased (Rosas 1998: 399). Born between the 1940s and the 1950s, most of the parents of today’s call centre workers were able to achieve permanent, stable employment in the clerical, low-​ skilled or manual trades. Most were born outside the main urban centres; a significant number were not able to achieve more than primary education, while others completed the ninth grade (equivalent to Key Stage 3 in the UK) and twelfth grade (full secondary education). A small minority attained an undergraduate degree. Nearly all of them started working quite early on in their lives, particularly in pequena agricultura familiar (small family agricultural production). Although many of them migrated to the cities looking for a better life, they continued to spend their holidays in their places of origin. They returned not only for affective reasons (i.e. to sustain kinship ties with the extended family and preserve social bonds) but also to bring back fresh fruit, vegetables and enchidos.10 There was an expression recurrently used by their sons and daughters to illustrate this: ir à terra (to visit the land). Present-​day call centre workers use the expression ir à terra to convey different meanings and intentions. It is a way of contrasting the place where their parents were raised to the urban timescape in which they themselves grew up, or of indicating their parents’ successful trajectory of escape from rural hardship. There is a deeper implicit meaning in the expression ir à terra, concerning the shifting historical conditions in which the previous generation devised strategies to overcome need through the articulation of horizons of hope and aspirations crossing generations and temporalities (Narotzky and Besnier 2014). In the context of a highly unequal and repressive society, the earlier generation combined Fordist-​ like employment opportunities with informal networks of provisioning resources, while engaging, within the frame of what was possible for them, with the status-​ laden consumption choices of an expanding market. They mobilised the social and historical forms available to act upon their needs, wishes and desires, across structures of kin and time. The reality of present need (of material resources and social worth) and a future-​oriented horizon of livelihood improvement informed

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intra-​generational aspirations of stable employment, educational achievement and upward class mobility for those who were to be born after.11 The livelihood model of middle-​class distinction was mobilised as a morality of social inclusion, status and productive incorporation into the national body. The production of a sense of future became embedded in shifting internal patterns of production and consumption (Bourdieu 2000). During the 1950s and 1960s, the regime promoted national developmental policies (planos de fomento) aimed at encouraging the growth of the industrial sector. Nevertheless, this growth took place against the backdrop of internal tensions, particularly of advocates of industrialisation with rural conservative forces. Such tensions existed between pronounced regional asymmetries and between the dynamic industrial south (with its high levels of proletarianisation) and the traditional north (with a higher concentration of traditional types of industry with lower wages), as well as between the tendency towards the concentration of monopoly capital (Santos 1977) and the neglect of a strategy of primary-​sector modernisation. The ‘golden age’ of capitalism (Hobsbawn 1994), as expressed in the Portuguese economy, was significant, but was conditioned by several internal vulnerabilities, such as the unsuccessful constitution of the ‘Portuguese common market’; the dragging on of the colonial war; an increase in wages and stability of employment in coastal cities, partly motivated by high levels of emigration and military mobilisation; the structural disequilibrium resulting from the stagnation of the agricultural sector; and the favouring of traditional exports strongly dependent on cheap labour. As noted by Rosas: When, beginning in the 1960s, the moment for European integration could no longer be delayed, the Portuguese industrial economy entered a progressively liberalised market equipped with old traditional industries or other more recent ones based on foreign capital, which was competitive only because of low-​wage labour. It was not long before the strategic sectors, which had been largely administratively created and maintained, began to suffer in the open market. The same could be said for the traditional sectors, which were also based on cheap labour. (1998: 100)

The corporatist project of accumulation and development enforced a national tradition of labour devaluation that laid the ground for the emergence of the call centre sector decades later, while informing the most intimate aspirations of economic and social freedom for the parents of today’s precarious call centre workers. Envisioning freedom: ‘April is still to be accomplished’ On 25 April 1974, a left-​wing military coup put an end to the oldest military dictatorship in twentieth-​century Western Europe. The genesis of the Portuguese revolution of 1974 was the Movimento das Forças Armadas (Armed Forces Movement), a movement organised in less than a year by 300 young officers (Ferreira 1993: 20), frustrated with the carnage of the thirteen-​year-​long colonial war.12 Dubbed the ‘Carnation Revolution’, it is the foundational moment of contemporary Portuguese

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democracy, as it enabled the legal codification of emancipatory rights and citizenship entitlement. The revolution is inscribed in the collective national memory as the moment when the impossible became possible and the present overcame the past. Nonetheless, the memory of what was possible is sometimes betrayed by the realisation of what might have been. Among critical leftist sectors of Portuguese society today, especially those occupied by people in their sixties and seventies, it is common to hear the expression ‘Falta cumprir April’ (‘April is still to be accomplished’). This expression indicates an ambivalent bitterness over what has been done and what remains to be done. It also indicates the lived experience of the contradictions and tensions underpinning the revolutionary conjuncture and its aftermath. Despite the undisputed significance of the conquests of April, they were not enough to prevent the continuation of deeply ingrained patterns of social inequality and labour devaluation within a macro context of the shifting dynamics of accumulation, regulation and value extraction. The peripheral nature of its economy and the requirements of alignment with the global ascendency of neoliberalism shape Portugal’s uneven integration in more extensive capitalist circuits.13 The disconnection between the socialist-​oriented goals of Portugal’s revolutionary process and external neoliberal imperatives intensifies endemic fragilities in the economy. Such fragilities are stabilised through the adoption of free-​market policies, eminently represented by the continuation of patterns of labour devaluation, and legitimised through a morally embedded national project of economic and social freedom, mirroring the aspirations of the majority of the population. Freedom was the moral and political grammar with which contradictions of capitalist accumulation were made coherent and stabilised. It was also the terrain on which ordinary people articulated investment strategies to perceived threats and possibilities affecting intra-​generational livelihood horizons.14 The parents of today’s precarious call centre workers experienced the emergence of the welfare state’s provisioning structures and social security entitlements, as well as the gradual dismantling of the possibility of full and secure employment. The imperative of making a living in the here-​and-​now led that generation to articulate various forms of livelihood provisioning, while deferring the promise of livelihood improvement into the future, for those to be born in freedom.15 The revolutionary movement’s ultimate goal of greater social justice and equality contributed to shifts that, if only for the revolutionary biennium of 1974–​ 75, changed the traditional relations between capital and labour (Rosas 2006). The national minimum wage was codified in law for the first time, and the right to strike was legalised in 1975. Social security benefits for sickness and the right to paid holidays became universalised, general access to education and health was secured, and freedom of speech and the press were consecrated in the constitution. More citizens of all classes participated in political life, to the point that during one period the popular movement rivalled the military movement for political affiliation and leadership (Rosas 2006: 24). In 1976, the new constitution of the Third Portuguese Republic was promulgated in Parliament, emphasising the need

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to move towards a society without classes, with the aim of ensuring a transition to socialism. The economic destiny of the nation should be ‘the development of socialist relations of production through the collective appropriation of the means of production and the democratic exercise of the power of the working classes’ (Ferreira 1993: 113). In the first revision of the constitution in 1982, this last article was changed to satisfy the requirements of the EEC, which Portugal had requested to join in 1977. In March 1975, following a failed counter-​revolutionary coup, the banking and insurance sectors were nationalised. Until July 1976, more than 240 firms would be under State control, in the sectors of energy and oil, steel, cellulose, urban transportation, mining, chemicals, and textiles. A land reform in favour of landless peasants was launched. In the streets, workplaces and neighbourhoods the popular activism of landless peasants, slum dwellers and workers was at its peak, expressed in land occupations, as well as in the emergence of workers’ and tenants’ committees. The hope was for grassroots struggles to be gradually transformed into a ‘popular power movement’, leading to a more participatory democracy (Hammond 1988; Downs 1989; Bermeo 1986). Advances and reversals shape the historical period from the aftermath of the revolutionary biennium until the joining of the EEC in terms of the economic and political legacy of the Carnation Revolution. In 1977, the Lei de Delimitação dos Sectores (Sectors’ Delimitation Law) was approved by the Government, which was led by the Socialist Party with the support of the Social Democratic Party. Although the banking system, insurance, electricity, water, mail and telecommunications, public transport, and airports remained in the public sector, the 1977 law allowed private enterprise in other sectors (refining, basic petrochemicals, armaments). The main controversy among the different political factions concerned the banking system. With the constitutional revision of 1982, a new law opened the way for its privatisation, as well as of the cement and insurance industries. Two political measures further reinforced private initiative:  the reprivatisation of nationalised companies and the payment of indemnities to the owners of previously nationalised firms and expropriated properties (Ferreira 1993: 126). During the first constitutional Government (1976–​78), the idea that the country should free itself from the ‘economic protectionism’ enforced by the dictatorship gathered consensus among political forces, in particular regarding the necessity of making labour relations more flexible to accommodate the development of market mechanisms. This idea was actualised through a series of changes in labour law and union representation. In 1976–​77, through the law decree no. 864/​76, firms in the public and private sectors were allowed to suspend collective work agreements (contratos colectivos de trabalhos) in ‘conditions of economic crisis’ (situação de crise económica). Conditions for short-​term work contracts (contrato de trabalho a prazo) were introduced by law decree no. 781/​76, in effect creating two groups of workers –​permanent and short-​term (casual) –​with antagonistic interests. The Lei de Unicidade Sindical (Law of Trade Union Unity), which guaranteed that the Intersindical16 had a monopoly of union representation, was set up after the revolution and shaped by the influence of the Partido Comunista Português (Portuguese

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Communist Party). This law was annulled, and, in 1978, a new union confederation was galvanised by the Socialist and the Social Democratic Parties as a way of decreasing the influence of the Communist Party through the Intersindical. This new union confederation  –​União Geral dos Trabalhadores (General Workers’ Union; UGT) –​rapidly gained a presence in the service sector (Ferreira 1993: 124–​5). Such legal reforms in the aftermath of the Carnation Revolution set the conditions for the call centre sector in present-​day Portugal. After the revolution, there was a general increase in wages, which stimulated internal demand but was not accompanied by the technological changes necessary for a sufficient increase in productivity to ensure the reproduction of capital. Because of the recessive effects of the oil crisis, external demand decreased; the tendency is to increase the rate of imports and diminish the rate of exports because of the fragile Portuguese productive apparatus, which aggravates public debt. From 1975 onwards, following the collapse of foreign exchange reserves, real wages began to decrease, the public sector deficit doubled and unemployment increased. Currency devaluation proved insufficient to correct the balance of payments, and Portugal accepted a macroeconomic financial assistance package from the IMF in the late 1970s and then again in the 1980s. The structural adjustment plans imposed by the IMF in both periods implied cuts in public expenditure and a policy of currency devaluation. According to Confraria (1999: 281) ‘in the end, labour markets proved to be remarkably flexible, and workers accepted declines in real wages following the macroeconomic stabilization packages agreed with the IMF in the late 1970s and the 1980s’.17 From the 1960s onwards, within the paternalistic framework of the Estado Novo regime, stable employment emerged within some sectors of the economy. But it was only following the Carnation Revolution that workers’ stability and security in employment were legally codified in the socialist-​oriented constitution as an entitlement of citizenship. The conditions under which stable and protected employment are institutionalised as a legal entitlement and normative life goal in Portugal diverge from core capitalist societies in two main aspects. First, the model of mass consumption underpinning stable employment regimes emerged late, and within the context of a dictatorship. Second, the expansion of stable employment relationships across various economic sectors was politically determined by a strong State intervention, in which the defence of workers’ rights is emphasised in the name of the transition to a socialist society, and not as a defence of the introduction of some form of reformed capitalism (Santos et al. 1990: 175). These two aspects have shaped the emergence of stable employment regimes in Portugal, and the terms of the country’s integration into emerging global forms of labour (de) regulation. The above trends mediated the mutual constitution of capitalist and generational transitions in Portugal while informing historical continuities in patterns of labour devaluation. As already illustrated, in Portugal, the State has had a decisive role in shaping, defining and institutionalising normative life goals, albeit within the context of a distinct ideological and moral apparatus of legitimation (i.e. corporatism, socialist transition, democratic freedom). Throughout

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the 1980s, the evidence that reality was growing further apart from normative livelihood aspirations was made manifest in the retention of subsistence models and strategies of consumption usually linked to traditional societies (e.g. pequena agricultura familiar), the increase in informal labour activities, and the resilience of a ‘welfare society’,18 which mitigates the deficiencies of a late-​developing and inefficient welfare state (Santos 1991; Cabral 1983). Cabral suggests that the national and international contexts encouraged the persistence of traditional means of subsistence and the growth of informal economic strategies. On the one hand, the political liberalisation of daily life allowed the informal economy to escape State control more easily. On the other, the expansion of welfare state provisioning was a late and deficient process. In the 1980s, people’s strategies for sustaining their livelihoods in the face of national and international recession combined ‘old’ systems of subsistence, mutual help, informal work practices and the forms of social protection assured by the State (specifically those related to security and employment protection codified in law after the revolution) (Cabral 1983: 214). The emancipatory promise of economic and social freedom, coupled with the progressive disconnect between State-​led normative life goals and the objective conditions of reality, reinforced people’s articulation of different livelihood strategies. This diversification became a way of confronting the here-​and-​now and providing future generations with the means and conditions to achieve what was slowly being eroded (i.e. social valuation and inclusion through secure employment). The growing dissonance between the State’s vision of livelihood and that of its citizens acted as a strong mechanism of labour devaluation. Santos (1991) argues for the emergence of an ‘estado paralelo’ (parallel State) throughout the 1970s and 1980s as a result of the coexistence of rigid labour law, stressing workers’ rights, and the systematic subversion of its practical applicability. A gap between the legal framework and actual social practices is illustrated by the State’s failure to enforce labour inspections and its toleration of labour law violations. During the 1980s especially, with the increasing neoliberalisation of labour relationships the gap between the patchiness in the practice of workers’ rights and the law takes the  form of wage payment delays in some industrial sectors. This was an illegal practice that, according to Santos (1985: 887), represents ‘the functional equivalent in present-​ day Portugal of pillaging in the period of primitive capital accumulation’. The contingent forms through which stable and protected employment emerged in Portugal mediated the terms on which the corporatist regime’s system of enforced labour devaluation was carried over to democratic times. Simultaneously, the changes in Portuguese society and economy following the Carnation Revolution cannot be overstated. The revolution and its emancipatory achievements provided ordinary people with the conditions and means (e.g. legal codification of workers’ rights and the residual expansion of stable and protected forms of employment) with which to articulate horizons of livelihood possibilities, as well as legal instruments with which to claim rights and entitlements that had been long denied (e.g. health, social security, education). The ambivalent, bitter memory of the revolution encapsulated in the expression ‘April is still to

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be accomplished’ is the most intimate and concrete expression of how bargains of life goals are mediated and determined by the inherent contradictions of State projects of capitalist development. For the parents of present-​day call centre workers, managing the tension between social and economic aspirations and the country’s gradual transition to broader neoliberal patterns of labour mobilisation and deployment implied accommodating a livelihood bargain: between the ongoing accommodation of reversals in the present (e.g. gradual neoliberalisation of the economy) and the promise of a modern and better livelihood in the future, represented by joining the EEC. Freedom was going to be replaced by modernity as the moral and ideological grammar bridging projects of accumulation and intra-​generational life goals. The neoliberal promise of modernity In political terms, Portugal’s integration into the EEC in 1986 is conveyed as the realisation of the collective aspirations of freedom and modernity nurtured since the revolution. The ideas of social modernity and economic progress were the central ideological conductors (Hall et al. 1978: vii, viii) legitimating the gradual emergence of a neoliberal State project of accumulation and development. The promise of modernity was also the moral framework guiding people’s intra-​generational livelihood investment strategies as they articulated ways of acting upon their own needs, in the present, and the needs of others, in the future. These two projects went hand in hand, mutually legitimating and informing one another. In parallel with the neoliberal reconfiguration of the economy, public State investment in welfare provisioning increased, social security expanded and access to higher education was made available on a larger scale. Fulfilling people’s social needs of security and status for themselves and the next generation constituted the legitimating counterpoint of growing neoliberalisation. While the neoliberal project was disguised as a project of modernity, the spread of State welfare provisioning institutions attended to the ingrained personal and collective memory of deprivation and repression, thereby reinforcing people’s longing for a better livelihood, expressed as an intra-​generational investment project of middle-​ class belonging and inclusion in the emergent modern Portugal. The neoliberal promise of modernity was materialised in a wave of privatisations of critical economic sectors: an emphasis on ‘free market’ rhetoric and a definitive change in the economic structure, characterised by the parallel growth of the service sector and ‘atypical forms of employment’,19 namely temporary work20 –​the prime source of labour for the contemporary call centre sector. The privatisation of the economy was facilitated by two revisions of the 1976 constitution –​in the years 1982 and 1989. Pro-​EU political parties justified revisions to the constitution as a national imperative tied to the greater management abilities of private enterprise. The revisions of the fundamental law of the country strongly reinforced the neoliberal reconfiguration of the economy and society. In 1990, the lei-​quadro das privatizações (general law of privatisations) was approved, allowing for the full privatisation of State assets. In 1990, Rui Machete, member

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of the Social Democratic Party (PSD), one of the political parties supporting the rhetoric and practice of privatisation, declared: ‘the approval of the general law of privatisations is an act of transcendental importance, which changes the framework of relations among the person, the society and the State’ (Mortágua and Costa 2015: 19). Major privatisations began with the financial sector; followed by the monopolies in the energy, telecommunications, and roads and infrastructure sectors; as well as in banking and insurances. The production of electricity was opened to the private sector, the water distribution and sewage industries went through significant changes, and natural gas distribution became an entirely new industry organised with one primary carrier and regional distributors. The privatisation spree was greatly facilitated by the tenure of a right-​wing Government, with strong conservative undertones, which adopted the neoliberal mantra as the path towards modernity. From 1985 to 1995, the PSD won two parliamentary majorities, each time obtaining over 50 per cent of the votes, gaining more than 145 seats in the 250-​seat assembly. The economic language promoted in the two mandates hung on the idea of ‘structural reforms in institutions, regulations and the functioning mechanisms of the market’. It promoted the idea of the ‘free working of market forces and private enterprise’ while alluding to the economic and political imperative of alignment with core countries within the EEC. The counterpoint of the neoliberal reconfiguration of the economy was realised through State public investment, primarily supported by transfers from the EEC, in roads, telecommunications and energy. The political rhetoric emphasised the need to minimise the problem of technological backwardness that, for most of the century, had been at the core of Portuguese industrial policy (Mateus 1992). In addition, welfare coverage grew, social benefits expenditure increased, State organisations expanded, and access to higher education was facilitated and promoted across social classes (Hespanha 2000). The parents of the current precarious generation, enabled by conditions of stable employment in pockets of Fordism along with other forms of non-​capitalist income, were able to achieve social conditions close to those regarded as lower-​ middle class. They were increasingly exposed to the ‘middle-​class effect’ (Estanque 2003, 2005). They bought houses and cars, saved money for their children, took advantage of the emerging public health sector and were able to send their children to university. Their material conditions meant they could frequent new urban leisure spaces, such as the cinema or the shopping mall. It was here that one’s self-​ worth could be measured and validated, based specifically on one’s conviviality and the goods one consumed. That this generation accommodated the available models of livelihood consumption was not merely due to a concealed ambition to become petit-​bourgeois. Their class-​and status-​laden choices and investments were as informed by identification with a middle-​class framework as they were by disidentification with a past collective memory of dispossession and deprivation (Skeggs 1997) and intra-​generational obligations and responsibilities. The former acted as an agentive and material force, shaping how people articulated ways of contradicting, resisting or accommodating a field of possibilities and conditions not entirely of their own making.

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Estanque (2003, 2005) argues that in Portugal the ‘middle-​class effect’  –​i.e. a symbolic referent promoted by State policies and prominently shaped by the mass expansion of higher education21 –​has been more powerful than the actual existence of an objective middle class, while it has served, among other things, to disguise the profound class inequalities among the population and to shape individual class identifications and expectations for the future. The aspirations of social modernity and economic freedom brought about by the inclusion of Portugal in the EEC were the backdrop against which the parents of today’s precarious call centre workers formed their subjective desires and aspirations. Their expectations concerning their sons and daughters were embedded in the belief in greater social equality, realised through upward social mobility, education and stable employment. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, various internal and external factors led to a significant shift in the distribution of the working population across economic activity sectors, and in particular the growth of the service sector (Confraria 1999). This is usually connected to three factors:  (a) the expansion of demand for services, for both direct consumption and intermediary uses; (b) the level of productivity, due to its lack of mechanisation; and (c) a large number of industrial enterprises beginning to outsource some of their services to other companies (e.g. cleaning, clothing and transportation), thus increasing the number of jobs in the sector (Rodrigues 1988). Between 1976 and 2011, the proportion of people working in services increased from 32.5 per cent to 62.9 per cent of the total population in employment.22 In parallel with the growth of the service sector, since joining the EEC, Portugal’s system of labour and employment relationships is increasingly determined by the two parallel developments of casualisation and outsourcing (Rodrigues 1988: 91). In the aftermath of the revolutionary process, two contradictory developments emerged. First, the priority of ensuring workers’ rights, including stability and security in employment, was codified in the constitution of 1976, and second, the need to align with labour deregulation shifts in the global economy was expressed with the legal codification in 1976 of the contrato a prazo (short-​term contract). The fragile development and status of Keynesian-​style forms of employment in Portugal were never completely assimilated by the economy. The new international competition encountered after entering the EEC, combined with the precarious nature of the Portuguese production apparatus, meant that any increase in capital could only be achieved through the devaluation of labour, namely the expansion of the aforementioned ‘atypical forms of employment’ such as temporary work (Rodrigues 1988: 228).23 In the 1990s and early 2000s, various studies were sponsored by the Portuguese Ministry of Labour, and conducted with the aim of identifying and mapping the national coverage and expansion of these atypical forms of employment (Cristóvam et al. 1996; Vaz 1997; Cerdeira 2000; Rosa 2003). There is consensus on the following shifts: (a) the growth of atypical forms of employment often entails a decrease in workers’ rights in terms of pay and length of contract, (b) the condition of being engaged in an atypical form of employment is often not voluntary,

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and (c) the institutionalisation of unstable and insecure forms of employment is the ‘normal form’ of integrating younger people in the labour market. Moreover, all studies suggest a straight relation between the increase of atypical forms of employment and growing flexibility of employment conditions through downsizing or outsourcing, particularly from the 1990s onwards (Vaz 1997). The spread and expansion of temporary employment in Portugal emerges prominently through a comparison within the context of the European Union. In the EU15 (1997–​2005), the number of people employed by temporary agencies of work increased 32.1 per cent, growing from 15,221 to 20,091, and in Portugal, the rise of temporary workers increased by 91.7 per cent in nine years. Portugal had the highest level of temporary employment as a proportion of overall employment, increasing by 7.5 per cent from 1997 to 2005 (Birindelli and Rustichelli 2007). During this time, Portugal was second to Germany in terms of the contribution of temporary work to the overall creation of employment (83 per cent in Germany and 59 per cent in Portugal). The growth of the call centre sector since the late 1990s is causally linked to the changes I  have referred to–​outsourcing, casualisation and the public sanctioning of temporary work as a desirable avenue of labour market integration for youngsters.24 Certain sectors of economic activity (particularly banking, telecommunications and insurance) began a process of outsourcing parts of their services to other companies. Following the flexibility paradigm, firms concentrated on their core activities and reduced labour costs by outsourcing or sub-​contracting those considered peripheral, such as customer service. This has provided the main work for call centres. Furthermore, call centres did not involve significant investment in technological infrastructure and, needing to be specifically designed for a Portuguese-​speaking market, most could not have been relocated to other countries (as happens, for instance, with the relocation of call centres for the English-​ speaking market to India). Nor did call centres need to look abroad for cheap labour. The traditional devaluation of labour in Portugal throughout the twentieth century proved to be the conditio sine qua non for the sector’s rapid growth. Its emergence and its successful growth are both related to historically contingent processes –​a national tradition of labour devaluation –​and to broader shifts in the dynamics of labour deregulation, particularly intensified following Portugal’s joining the EEC. Conclusion The poem standing in the epigraph to this chapter was written in 1965 by a surrealist and modernist Portuguese author, Alexandre O’Neill (1924–​86), during the dictatorship. The poem signals the paralysis and inability to act produced by the repressive regime of the dictatorship, and the individual and collective regret emerging from such inability. Despite having been written decades ago, it preserves its relevance. To me, the poem’s reference to the regret ‘for us all’ aptly illustrates the disillusionment emerging from accumulated impossibilities and longings, from the struggles to be without ever becoming. Ultimately, the poem’s

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regret mirrors the effects of dispossession arising from the contradictions and tensions between the normative and the real, the anticipated and the expected, at the core of Portugal’s State capitalist projects of accumulation and development. In Portugal’s recent history, (enforced) necessity, freedom and modernity were the moral and ideological frameworks of legitimation embedding the mutual constitution of State projects and intra-​generational life goals. Their mutual constitution produced convergences and tensions, enabling the establishment of contradictions, or their displacement towards the future. Capitalist development projects have incorporated people’s aspirations to improve their status and well-​ being, while these aspirations and life goals have accommodated dispossession in the here-​and-​now in exchange for the possibility of a livelihood horizon across generations. Throughout different historical conjunctures, State development projects and emergent intra-​generational life goals are mutually determined by an ingrained tradition of labour devaluation and a strong State intervention. In his analysis of the historical formation of the Portuguese State from the first Republic (1910) up to the Carnation Revolution, Chilcote (2010:  27) convincingly argues that ‘the constancy of the Portuguese state throughout different regimes’ suggests ‘that authoritarianism has been the rule rather than the exception’. Three main aspects illustrate the formal constancy of the Portuguese State. First, State activities have been centralised, expressed in the tendency to concentrate the political class in the capital city and to subordinate municipal government to central power. Second, the State demonstrates juridical and structural continuity. During the Carnation Revolution, it was the primary site of struggle among political and social forces, but the emphasis was always on strong State intervention, through institutional organs, to provide legitimacy for differentiated economic programmes of development. Third, traditional forces have persisted in Portuguese society, exemplified by the contradiction between the aims of administrative modernisation and extensive networks of clientelism pervading State structures. Lucena (1976) argues for the inescapable importance of the corporatist legacy, in that corporatism in Portugal assumed two primary forms: an integral form, encompassing economic, cultural and moral activities, and a limited form, aimed at disciplining the antagonism between capital and labour. This distinction, rather than narrowing corporatism to specific governments and constitutions, allows us to envision how corporatism, as the normalisation of class struggle and the means of managing inter-​class relations, may gain a pervasive expression beyond institutional processes and official Government programs. In historical reality, the State was always crucial to the successful construction of the market society, and the facilitation of shifting regimes of accumulation (Polanyi 2001 [1944]; Jessop 1983). The Portuguese context suggests a specific articulation between the State and the development of the neoliberal project. Some authors suggest that the capture of the State form is at the core of the neoliberal project (Harvey 2005; Peck 2010; Wacquant 2012). The Portuguese context anticipates neoliberal needs of accumulation, given the historically ingrained patterns of labour devaluation, and the constancy of a strong State intervention in the making and unmaking of regimes of accumulation and governance. In

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contrast to dominant explanatory narratives, in Portugal, the rise and expansion of the call centre sector was not only a consequence of globalisation or neoliberal doctrine. Rather, Portugal’s entry into the EEC in 1986 intensified neoliberal trends associated with employment precarisation in the service sector, which, rather than being new, were indeed facilitated by Portugal’s ingrained tradition of labour devaluation. The global qualities of the call centre sector should not be overestimated. Doing so tends, ultimately, to reinforce a general typological and ahistorical understanding of regimes of capitalist extraction and neoliberal economic shifts among national contexts with uneven histories of integration in the world economy. As pointed out by critical feminist theory, capitalist practices and logics of value extraction are not reducible to the realms of the labour process and the market. On the contrary, value extraction builds upon the accumulated outcomes arising from the interplay between models of accumulation and models of livelihood horizons and aspirations, along the lines of kin, class, status and generation. Neoliberal service labour regimes emerged in the context of history (i.e. how historical neoliberalisation processes are articulated with domestic patterns of capitalist development, or how change is implemented through structural continuities) and contingency (i.e. how it relates to preceding structural formations such as class, kin or generation).25 The unfulfilled expectations of middle-​class status, for those currently working in call centres, represent a historically bounded ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams 1977: passim), informed by the social aspirations laid on them by the mutual constitution of State projects of accumulation and development and intra-​generational life goals and investments. In the next chapter, I further explore the theme of unfulfilled generational expectations for those working in call centres, by examining how call centres came to be a central symbol of precarity in contemporary Portugal. Notes 1 The ACD, also known as the automated call distribution system, consists of a telephony device that answers and distributes incoming calls to a specific group of terminals or agents within an organisation. 2 This approach draws inspiration from Marx’s (1990 [1976]) theory of exploitation combined with political-​ economic anthropological approaches (e.g. Mintz 1986; Roseberry 1988; Wolf 2010 [1982]) and the central contribution of feminist critical theory in asserting how value extraction does not exist outside non-​capitalist realms, logics and practices (e.g. Mies 1986; Costa and James 1975; Fortunati 1995; Redclift 1988). 3 The EEC is the predecessor of the present European Union (EU). The EEC was created by the Treaty of Rome in 1957 and incorporated into the EU upon its formation in 1993; in 2009 the EEC’s institutions were integrated into the broader framework of the EU. 4 The inspiration was Italy’s Carta del Lavoro (Charter of Labour), instituted in 1927 and governing labour during Fascist rule (1922–​43). 5 For an overview of the development of the articulation of capitalist and non-​capitalist modes of production in modern Portugal, see Pereira (1974).

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6 In 1911, 75.1 per cent of the population was illiterate; this had dropped to 69.3 per cent in 1940 and 48.7 per cent in 1950. By 1960 40.3 per cent were still illiterate. That is, in 1940 Portugal had the level of illiteracy that Spain had had in 1900, and in 1950 the same as Italy had had in 1910 (Carreira 1996: 436). 7 Portugal joined the European Free Trade Association in 1959, and in 1972 signed a commercial agreement with the EEC. 8 Agricultural labour decreased from 48 per cent in 1950 to 42 per cent in 1960 and 32 per cent in 1970 (Rosas 1998: 378). 9 The percentage of workers in the manufacturing and extractive industries increased from 25 per cent in 1950 to 29 per cent in 1960 and 33 per cent in 1970, while the commercial sub-​sector increased from 8 per cent in 1950 to 12 per cent in 1970 (Rosas 1998: 378). 10 Portuguese enchidos are made with pork, fat, wine and salt. They are a sausage-​type food, slowly smoked. 11 In a survey of the Portuguese population in 1994, for respondents born after 1930 –​like my interviewees’ parents –​a rate of 60 per cent absolute intergenerational (i.e. from one generation to another) social mobility was found. When asked what the most important legacy is that parents should leave their children, respondents of all classes agreed that it should be the ‘work habit’. When asked what is more important for youngsters, a ‘good job’ or a ‘good degree’, 48 per cent responded a ‘good job’ and 50 per cent a ‘good degree’. This division, cross-​cutting various social classes, is representative of (1) a strict correlation between getting a ‘good job’ and having proper educational credentials, and (2) a valuation of educational capital (Cabral 1998: 405). 12 For a detailed account in English of the genesis of the movement, see Blackburn (1974). 13 The literature on the neoliberal recomposition of global capitalism from the 1970s onwards is extensive. See, for instance, Harvey (1989, 2005). 14 Authors adopting a ‘moral economy’ approach to economic livelihood practices (e.g. Thompson 1971; Scott 1977; Sayer 2000, 2005, 2011) underline how people articulate the legitimacy of their material and moral needs within the boundaries of generational responsibilities, social networks, mutual obligations or a sense of a shared past. The moral framing of economic livelihood strategies and decision-​making may lead to the reinforcement of emancipatory goals, or the naturalisation of social forms underpinned by inequality and differentiation. 15 As noted by Rofel (1999), in contexts where the development of modernity did not follow a Euro-​centric and American route, a ‘deferred relationship with modernity’ shapes the ways in which forms of domination and exclusion are enacted in the name of modernity, and also the moral struggles pursued with and through generations in pursuit of a sustaining and fulfilling life. 16 The predecessor of the present Confederação Geral dos Trabalhadores Portugueses (General Confederation of the Portuguese Workers), created in 1970 and organically linked to the Portuguese Communist Party. 17 Krugman and Macedo (1981) argue that the most enduring consequence of the April revolution was the transformation of Portugal into a ‘politicized market economy’, in which the price of labour was the main dilemma. Classifying Portugal before the revolution as a ‘newly industrializing country’ the authors state that the reasons that led to some economic growth during the 1960s and 1970s were, first, the exploitation of an abundant supply of semi-​skilled workers; second, the exportation of labour-​intensive manufactured goods; and third, the export of labour through emigration.

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18 Santos (1991:  37) defines ‘welfare society’ as ‘the networks of relationships of inter-​ knowledge, mutual recognition, and mutual help based on kinship and community ties, through which small social groups exchange goods and services. The welfare society is therefore also a form of social capital, which is valued especially among those families and social groups that have a lack of public welfare support. 19 For a broad overview on the institutional emergence and expansion of the term ‘atypical forms of employment’, see Rodgers and Rodgers (1989). 20 Temporary employment in Portugal presupposes a relationship among three agents (the worker, a company that uses the worker’s labour power (user firm) and the agency providing the worker). This relationship is based on two kinds of contract: a work contract between the worker and the agency (its only peculiarity being that it implies that the worker will provide their services to a third party) and a contract for the provision of services between a firm that intends to use temporary work (i.e. the user firm) and a temporary agency that supplies it. The most significant form of temporary employment in Portugal is that provided through an agency. It was first established in Portugal in 1960, when a franchise of the North American company Manpower was set up, and was legally authorised in 1962. The Portuguese branch of Manpower initially hired mainly female workers, as the vast majority of men were being mobilised for the colonial war (1961–​74). In 1974 there were four temporary work agencies, which opened and closed in the same year, but afterwards Manpower remained the only instance of such agency work active in Portugal until 1979 (Santana and Centeno 2001:  75). According to Santana and Centeno, in 1979 the then Council of the European Communities approved a resolution that appealed to all member states to establish measures assuring the social protection of temporary workers. Only in 1985 did the Portuguese Government begin discussing this issue by opening up to public discussion a project for a regulatory, legal statute. For the next four years, no consensus in terms of the establishment of a legal framework for the regulation of temporary agency work (TAW) was achieved. This only became possible in 1989, when the first law regarding TAW was promulgated. In 1988 the Associação Portuguesa de Empresas de Trabalho Temporário (Portuguese Association of Temporary Agency Work) was founded, and in 1989 the first collective agreement for the sector was established with the signature of the UGT. 21 In 1991, the number of people holding a higher education degree was 18,671, and by 2010 this number had grown to 78,609; Pordata, www.pordata.pt/​Portugal/​Diplomado s+no+ensino+superior+total+e+por+nivel+de+formacao-​219 (accessed August 2017). 22 Data retrieved on August 2017 from Pordata. All the quantitative data presented in this chapter cover the period from 1976 to 2011. From 2011 to 2014 Portugal underwent a structural adjustment programme imposed by the IMF, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the European Commission. The austerity debt regime imposed was particularly shaped by policies of labour devaluation, which have forced extreme rates of mass unemployment and precarious employment. 23 From the 1970s onwards, adjustments to the Portuguese economy were achieved through policies of currency devaluation. Since 2002, price stability among members of economic and monetary union has been regulated through the ECB, which means that exchange rates stopped being an internal instrument when facing situations of disequilibrium. In Portugal, such adjustments have been exercised especially in the labour market (i.e. the price of labour) (Confraria 2005: 413). 24 A dimension analysed in detail in the next chapter. 25 As pointed out by Peck (2010), neoliberalism as a project of economic and social governance does not realise itself by imposing upon different countries the Hayekian recipe

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of the utopia of the self-​regulating market, fear of State intervention and the glorification of individual liberties. There is a significant divergence between neoliberalism as a theoretical project and its historical, practical application (Harvey 2005; Peck 2010; Wacquant 2012). That is, neoliberalisation is not ‘the antithesis of regulation, it is a self-​contradictory form of regulation-​in-​denial’, expressed ‘in the form of an adaptive, mutating, and contradictory mode of governance’ (Peck 2010: xiii). For instance, after adhesion to the EU, the Portuguese State supported policies that were implemented in the guise of modernity and progress (e.g. mass expansion of higher education, road construction, etc.), while at the same time promoting the economic interests of the private sector (e.g. liberalisation of the labour market, extended privatisation of state assets, etc).

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3

Call centres as icons of precarity: between emancipation and stigma

In Portugal, the categories of trabalho precário (precarious labour), precariedade laboral (labour precarity) and the precariado (precariat) have entered everyday language. Since the mid-​2000s, there is growing publicly and politically sanctioned association between precarity and highly qualified youngsters engaged in insecure, low-​paid work in the service industry. In 1994, in the midst of ongoing student demonstrations against a more restrictive framework to accessing higher education, the editor of the Portuguese daily newspaper Público signed a front-​ page article entitled ‘Geração rasca’ (‘Troubled Generation’). The article aroused some controversy, but it served the purpose of typecasting young generations as amoral, apolitical and unethical. In 2008, the Troubled Generation was renamed as the ‘Geração 500 euros’ (‘500 euro generation’), encompassing overqualified young people in their thirties with insecure jobs, said to constitute at the time 28 per cent of the working population. The 500 euro generation were characterised by having mostly temporary jobs in the service industry without benefiting from any recognition by traditional workers’ organisations, such as trade unions and political parties. In March 2011, the Troubled Generation emerged from apparent silence and resignation. A group of young people called for a public demonstration through social media networks, presenting themselves as ‘non-​partisan, secular and pacifists’, claiming for people to demonstrate for improved working conditions and an end to ‘employment precarity’. The protest, one of the biggest since the Carnation Revolution of 1974, took place in eleven cities and became known as the ‘Geração à Rasca’ (‘Generation in Trouble’) social movement. From the mid-​2000s up to the present, the terminology of precarity has been mobilised primarily as an illustration of the breakdown in expectations surrounding social continuity across generations –​a way of emphasising the failure of projects of middle-​ class distinction, based on stable employment, among youngsters with educational credentials. In Portugal, the relational and moral dimension of expectations across generations emerges as the determining background against which the phenomenon of precarity and the politics of the precariat are situated.

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The political status of the term has shown it to possess a contested moral character, torn between emancipatory possibilities and the threat of moral stigma tied to downward social mobility and social devaluation. In this chapter, I begin by providing a summary of the emergence of the precarity vocabulary within Southern Europe, emphasising its mobilisation as a terminology of social emancipation and critique among anti-​globalisation social activists. I offer a brief discussion on the debates regarding the condition of precarity and the class status of the precariat. The purpose of this summary is to provide the reader with a general view of the phenomenon of precarious work and its particular form of development in Portugal. In the remainder of the chapter, I  concentrate on the moral politicisation of the call centre sector in order to demonstrate how the sector became the symbol par excellence of insecure employment in Portugal. A brief chronicle: the EuroMayday movement, ‘San Precario’ and the precariat The categories to which I  have already referred are also widely used in France (travail précaire, travailleur précaire, précarité), Italy (lavoro precário, lavoratore precario, precarietá del lavoro) and Spain (trabajo precario, trabajador precario, precariedad). The terminology of precarity was initially deployed by French economists and sociologists in the 1970s to describe the nouvelle pauvreté (‘new poverty’) afflicting families and households (Barbier 2002). In the 1990s, national and supra-​ national institutions of governance (e.g. the International Labour Organization) mobilised it as a bureaucratic category (see e.g. Rodgers and Rodgers 1989), and in the 2000s political activists articulated and used it as an emancipatory term in response to the neoliberal conditions of labour (de)regulation, born within the context of European anti-​capitalist/​globalisation social movements and the EuroMayday protests (Neilson and Rossiter 2008).1 Precarity has shifted from a technical policy category towards a potential social grammar of critique and emancipation among the emerging ‘class in the making’, designated as the precariat (Standing 2011, 2014). The slogan ‘Stop précarité’ first made its appearance in 2000 when a group of part-​time workers in French McDonald’s restaurants initiated a campaign on working conditions.2 In 2001, before the anti-​G8 protest at its summit in Genoa, the Italian-​based activist group Chainworkers was the central protagonist in the organisation of the first ‘Mayday Parade’ of 500 participants. Again, their main slogan was ‘Stop al precariato’ (Raunig 2007). Since then, the EuroMayday movement has spread beyond Italian borders to other cities in Europe, such as Berlin, Lisbon (which joined the movement in 2007), Malaga, Geneva and Zürich, and also outside Europe, to Toronto and Tokyo. In a 2004 interview, Alex Foti, a Chainworkers member and one of the main organisers of the Mayday Parade, expressed his notion of precarity as ‘the condition of being unable to predict one’s fate or having some degree of predictability on which to build social relations and feelings of affection’ (Foti 2004). According to Foti, precarity is a condition intrinsic to emerging forms of neoliberal post-​industrial production, based

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on the valorisation of informational, relational and knowledge-​driven forms of labour. The ‘precariat’ is claimed to be the new political subject produced by neoliberalism, and potentially the new revolutionary subject. This is illustrated when Foti states that: If young people stop working in Amsterdam, Amsterdam shuts down. No bars can operate; no tourist hotel can operate; no fucking newspaper can be ever produced; no theatre play can run. Amsterdam is a factory shut for business. This is what Amsterdam says to the world, its image brand and sociability, which occurs through bodies and minds of thousands of young temps, precarious freelancers coming from all over the world. This is what precarity is –​it’s both a condition of exploitation and an opportunity (Foti 2004(my italics))

As Gerald Raunig (2007) argues, there is a subtle difference of discourse between the first demonstrations in the French McDonald’s restaurants and the emancipation discourse proclaimed by Foti. In 2000, the aim was to protest against precarious labour conditions, whereas in later discourses, the ‘precariat’ has claimed visibility for itself; it has changed from something to be prevented to a self-​designation. This claim for ‘self-​designation’ began not only with the 1 May parade but also through heterodox forms of propaganda and activist action. Since February 2004, the rallies, demonstrations and interventions associated with the EuroMayday movement have added another icon of propaganda:  the supposed patron saint of precarious workers, ‘San Precario’ (Figure 3.1). Like other saints within the Catholic tradition of public processions, the statue of San Precario, a precarious worker on his knees praying to God, is carried to several Italian cities with a concentration of precarious workers. The cult has its own ritual prayer (Figure 3.2), and its primary goal is to function as a rhetorical device to express criticism of the increasing casualisation of employment. San Precario has a sanctuary on the beach of Lido di Venezia and his feast day is 29 February (a date that in itself is a symbol of intermittence, given that occurs only every four years). According to Tari and Vanni (2005), one of the first appearances of San Precario was organised by the collective Chainworkers on the outskirts of Milan, following the rules of religious processions. His statue was carried out to the streets, preceded by an assorted clergy, including a cardinal reciting prayers over a loudspeaker, and followed by pious people. They crossed various streets, arriving at a supermarket. The activists walked along the aisles of the supermarket distributing San Precario cards to shoppers, or using them to replace price tags. The growing use and dissemination of precarity terminology among social activists was parallel to a renewed interest among academics in the nature and roots of labour exploitation under (neoliberal) capitalism. Various debates emerged on the (historical) contested novelty of precarious labour and the disputed class status of the precariat. Some authors articulate the novel character of contemporary forms of labour precarity as tied to a qualitative shift in the capitalist system, driven by the emerging hegemonic role of immaterial labour and the biopolitics of the ‘multitude’ (Hardt and Negri 2000, 2005), or by the erosion of ‘wage earning

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3.1  The patron saint of precarious workers, San Precario

society’ and rising patterns of ‘social disaffiliation’ and ‘negative individualism’ (Castel 2002). In contrast, authors approaching the contemporary phenomenon of precarious labour from a Marxist perspective, in the context of the capitalist longue durée, argue that labour under capitalism has always been precarious, highlighting the systemic and structural role of surplus labour forces in capitalist accumulation (Munck 2013; Palmer 2014). The search for a new, class-​based, potentally revolutionary political subject in the figure of the precariat (Hardt and Negri 2005: 294),

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3.2  San Precario prayer

or for an emerging class in the making (Standing 2011), has been disputed from the point of view of collective mobilisation and gender (Mitropoulos 2006; Federici 2008; Ross 2008, 2009; Wacquant 2008). The debate over precarious work and the class status of the precariat (in Europe) was preceded by discussions within anthropology and sociology regarding the conservative or emancipatory role of the informal economy (on the periphery).3 The concept of the informal economy was introduced by Keith Hart (1973), based

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on urban research conducted in Ghana, to refer to sources of income outside the formal sphere of economic transactions both in the illegitimate (i.e. smuggling) and the legitimate (i.e. borrowing) realms. This debate led to discussions regarding the nature of the informal sector within capitalist relations of production that are similar to the readings of precarious work as an emancipatory activity. Connolly (1985) argues that while some authors emphasise the revolutionary potential of the informal sector as a way of resisting the tyranny of capitalist production, others, such as Anibal Quijano Obregón (who criticises the marginalisation theory advanced in the 1960s) consider that the analysis of the informal sector tends to reinforce the dichotomy between modern progress (formal sector), and traditional backwardness and poverty (informal sector) (Obregón 1974). According to Connolly, ‘the problem of “los marginados” is not that they are exploited, but rather, that they are not even exploited’ (1985: 65). It is not the purpose of this chapter to provide an exhaustive overview of earlier intellectual genealogies shaping contemporary debates on the condition of precarity and the category of the precariat. Rather, I wish to specify the links between the emergence of the call centre sector and the spread of the category of precarious labour in Portugal. I aim neither to determine if precarity is an entirely new phenomenon of post-​industrial societies or the standard rule of work for the vast majority of the world population, nor to assert if the precariat is the post-​industrial successor to the proletariat. Beyond binaries and dichotomous oppositions, this chapter suggests a more nuanced theorisation of the terminology of precarity. I am interested in emphasising the historical, political and morally embedded character of the categories of precarious labour, precarity and the precariat. In what follows, I  emphasise particular aspects of the relationship between casual labour and call centres in Portugal. I look at how the media increasingly depicted call centre work as a defining feature of the young workers in the 500 euro generation and, later, the Generation in Trouble, before and after the implementation of the austerity adjustment programme.4 Then I analyse how call centre labour became the main focus of a national moral politics of precarity. On the one hand, the call centre sector has been hailed by the Government and employers’ associations as an ‘important source of employment’, and on the other hand, social movements against casualisation, left-​wing parties and trade unions have targeted the call centre as the central symbol of the restructuring of labour and employment relations in Portugal. Call centres in the media: from the 500 euro generation to the new ‘India of Europe’ In 2007, Expresso, a well-​known weekly Portuguese newspaper, published an eight-​page report entitled ‘A malta dos call centers’ (‘The Gang of Call Centres’). The report begins by describing a seminarian aged 31 who decides to quit his studies in theology and apply for a job through a temping agency (Pereira 2007). He ends up accepting a job as a call centre operator, where, according to the

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journalist, he is praised for two particular qualities: ‘a pleasant tone of voice’ and a good command of the Portuguese language. The journalist further adds that after eleven months this worker is able to sign a contract with the user firm and that now he is committed to making progress inside the company and beginning an undergraduate course in economics (the call centre in question is attached to an insurance company). The journalist suggests that call centres could be ‘a new land of opportunities for the young generation’ (13). The Expresso report cites other cases as examples of a successful trajectory inside the call centre world, although it also points out that no data on the sector are available from official sources (i.e. the National Institute of Statistics and the Institute of Employment and Professional Training). Set against its stories of success, it also mentions that union protection is almost absent and that wages have been declining dramatically in the sector. In 1998, a full-​time call centre operator earned €750–​800 per month. By 2007, this had fallen to around €400.5 The vast majority of workers are female university students, particularly from the social sciences and humanities. The journalist ends the report by telling the story of a 16-​year-​old boy who is still in high school. He started working part-​time during the summer doing telemarketing campaigns for Portugal Telecom and then decided to keep the part-​time job, trying to reconcile it with his studies. The journalist writes: ‘He only has one day off per week and the targets to be achieved are very demanding:  if the operator makes thirty sales per month he does not earn more than €170. However, contrary to the union logic of older generations Alexandre smiles and says: I like very much what I do’ (15). In July 2007, the front page of the daily newspaper Diário de notícias carried the headline ‘Moda dos call centers já emprega 50 mil jovens’ (‘The Call Centre Trend Already Employs 50,000 Youngsters’). The report occupied the two first pages of the newspaper, with another headline, ‘Geração 500 euros refém dos call centers’ (‘€500 Generation Hostage to Call Centres’) (Aguiar 2007).6 This is a clear change of tone and content from the reportage previously quoted. This second example emphasises the precarious contractual links between workers and temping agencies, as well as the difference in wages between temporary and permanent workers with the same function. The Diário de notícias article states that a call centre operator working for Portugal Telecom (PT) receives €613 per month, while a temporary worker in the same company doing the same job earns €447 per month. The article reports the case of a student in the 25–​30 age band who has just graduated from university as a typical example of the 500 euro generation: Fábia Alves personifies the ideal-​type of the €500 Generation. At the start of 2006, right after finishing her degree, she decided that she would have to find a job. The available options in her academic area (media and communications) were not very encouraging, which meant that it did not take her long to decide to follow the path that other colleagues of hers had already followed: call centres. (Aguiar 2007: 4)

During 2008, media references to call centre work and labour precarity increased. In November 2008 a regular column in Diário de notícias headlined

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‘Na pele de …’ (‘In the Skin of …’) was devoted to ‘being a call centre operator’ (Ferreira 2008). This column appears regularly; the journalist usually takes a job in a particular industry for a period of five-​to-​seven days and then describes its main characteristics. Occupying two whole pages of the newspaper, the ‘Na pele de …’ journalist devoted most of the article to a description of the high level of vigilance in call centre work and the rule of procedures for every action; the call centre is a ‘society where everyone plays their role without questioning authority’, she concluded. Call centres are presented as the main ‘symbol of temporary and precarious work’ (20). In 2011, Rádio Televisão Portuguesa, the national television broadcaster, streamed a fifty-​minute documentary entitled ‘Good Morning, How Can I Help You?’ on the reality of call centre work in the country.7 The reportage opens with inside images of call centres, geometrical rows of small cabinets, while a voice-​off describes the call centre as a ‘kind of electronic assembly line’. Two of the main interviewees are introduced through their working trajectories at PT. João, 31 years old, has worked at the call centre for the last seven years, has a degree in philosophy and is currently finishing a master’s. Nádia is 27 years old, is studying law and has worked there since 2007. ‘This is not the job I dreamed of; I dreamed that I would be a lawyer’, she says. Both state that they never had an employment contract with PT, the owner of a sub-​company, PT Contact, a temping agency dedicated to recruiting and training call centre workers for the company. Although they have been working in the same place, doing the same job for the same company, they have had various employment contracts with different temping agencies. The views and experiences of these two workers portray a sector shaped by chronic employment insecurity and low wages, and a labour process dominated by productivity goals, lack of autonomy and intrusive methods of labour surveillance. The programme ends by going back to its initial concept: the call centre workforce mirrors the sense of entrapment, frustration and demoralisation of a generation for whom stable, protected and permanent employment is an ever-​receding mirage. The final images of the documentary follow a young female call centre operator, Liliana, who is 25 years old. She expresses her frustration and sadness at not finding a job in her area of study and not being rewarded for the investment she made in so many years of education. She comments that ‘The call centre is not the ideal I had in mind for myself.’ We see Liliana arriving at her parents’ house, where she lives. She is not fulfilled at work, but neither is she resigned. She plans to go back to university to do a degree in veterinary medicine –​‘I am sure that I will not be leaving my parents’ house in the next five years’ –​by which time she will be 30. From 2011 onwards, call centres as icons of precarity recurrently surfaced in the media as the main object with which to critique the austerity-​led intensification of labour precarisation. Two articles published by the newspaper Público in 2013 are particularly representative. The first –​‘Se não estás satisfeito, a porta de saída é ali’ (‘If You Are Not Satisfied the Exit is Over There’) –​states in the opening phrases that ‘working in a call centre is to live in a world of poverty, instability, pressures and humiliations’ (Moura 2013b). The journalist uses testimonies of

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workers to underline highly precarious employment conditions and a workspace in which employees are obliged to carry out tasks that place them in conditions of moral ambiguity, having to lie to customers, cheat them into buying the various services and products companies make available on the market. The second article  –​‘Os call centers vão salvar a economia portuguesa?’ (‘Are Call Centres Going to Save the Portuguese Economy?’) –​expands critically on the idea promoted by call centres’ management representatives that the 2008 economic crisis represented an opportunity to develop the sector (Moura 2013a). The main advantages of the national context are said to result from the combination of an available surplus labour force with good skills in foreign languages, the existence of good technological infrastructures and low wages. The journalist draws on an interview conducted with the CEO of Teleperformance, a company employing 200 workers in the early 2000s, which had expanded to 4,000 by 2013. The CEO signals that if, some years ago, India, the Philippines or China were prime examples of contact services exports, today the situation is changing, particularly because other countries –​such as Portugal –​are beginning to have ‘favourable [i.e. low] labour costs’ (Moura 2013b: 6). Another interviewee, the president of the National Association of Outsourcing, emphasises that intense lobbying is being undertaken to bring the ‘big global call centres’ to Portugal. The country is advertised as the perfect place to find a ‘talented labour force’, ‘global accessibility’ and an enjoyable lifestyle, with good weather, food and competitive labour costs (Moura 2013a). These two articles illustrate emerging tendencies in the Portuguese call centre sector facilitated by austerity policies of wage repression and labour devaluation. During the austerity years, the call centre sector became more and more publicised in national and international media as the new India of Europe on account of two main factors: low wages and a young labour supply with educational credentials and linguistic skills. From the mid-​2000s up to the present, media representations of call centre work contributed significantly to the public sanctioning and dissemination of this particular form of work as the central icon of precarity. Call centres as such symbols emerge as a ‘land of opportunity’ for youngsters, or as the most evident concrete reality of the material and moral dispossession of the 500 euro ­generation. In times of crisis and austerity, call centres as icons of precarity are either a ‘paradise of exploitation’ or the potential ‘salvation of the Portuguese economy’. In the next section, I discuss how call centres in this role became embedded in specific economic and political developments before and during the implementation of the austerity adjustment programme. During this period, call centres as icons of precarity were a privileged ground on and through which different social forces intervened in the dispute over the political and moral legitimacy of precarity. The politicisation of the call centre sector In 2008, important changes affecting call centres were taking place in Portugal, namely the Government’s proposal for the reform of labour law, the impact of the financial crisis, the rapid diffusion of call centres to interior regions of the country and the growing public visibility of social movements against precarious

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working conditions. On 22 March of that year, the proposed labour law reform was presented to unions and employers’ associations. Negotiations took place under the aegis of the Conselho Permanente de Concertação Social (Standing Council for Social Consultation) until 4 June.8 A few months later, in November, the labour law reform was approved by the Portuguese Parliament. Before any public discussion about it took place, several public demonstrations were protesting against the deregulation of labour relations and the rising rates of unemployment in the country. On 18 October 2007 the Informal European Summit had taken place in Lisbon. Its goal was to discuss the Treaty of Lisbon, which was to be officially signed by the heads of European member states two months later, on 13 December. On that same day, a demonstration was organised by the Confederaçao Geral dos Trabalhadores Portugueses (General Confederation of the Portugues Workers; CGTP), one of the leading Portuguese trade union confederations, opposing the neoliberal rules contained in the Lisbon Treaty regarding labour and employment relationships. According to union sources, 200,000 people were present at the demonstration, which took place in the eastern part of the city, close to the telecommunications buildings near the River Tejo that are mostly occupied by call centres. On 5 June 2008, another demonstration took place in the centre of Lisbon, this time against the labour law reform. Portuguese specialists in labour law denounced the proposed new law as containing unconstitutional elements, the most important being a disguised attempt to change the constitution. They were particularly concerned to protect the principle of favourable treatment of workers (favor laboris), formerly enshrined in labour law, and to challenge the stipulation that collective agreements would expire if one of the signatories refused to renew. The proposed new labour law was primarily designed to address the alleged Portuguese ‘rigidity of employment protection’ as the main cause of rising unemployment (Centeno 2006).9 Several legal changes with the goal of achieving ‘greater labour flexibility’ had been introduced in Portugal since the 1990s. Some of these made it easier for employers to impose redundancies (no. 64-​A/​89) and work-​time flexibility (no.  103/​99). Moreover, the labour code approved in 2004 (no. 99/​2003, 27-​08) had already introduced several forms of flexibility into the employee–​employer relationship, particularly in terms of the types of employment contract (Rebelo 2006). For instance, the contrato de trabalho a termo certo (short-​ term contract of employment), introduced after the revolution, was, until 2004, restricted to a duration of thirty-​six months (with a limit of two renewals). After 2004, with the new labour code, the legal duration of such a contract was extended to six years (with a limit of three renewals), which enlarged the range of legal, authorised reasons for this form of contract. In 2006, the EU published a green paper urging member states to ‘modernise labour law in order to accomplish the goals set out in the Lisbon strategy’ (EC 2006). In accordance with the EU recommendations, in November 2007 the Portuguese Ministry of Labour published the Livro branco das relações laborais (The White Book of Labour Relations) in which flexibility was the suggested path

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for the reform of the labour law scheduled for 2008 (Comissão do Libro Branco das Relações Laborais 2007). As already mentioned, the new labour code approved in Parliament in November 2008 (no.  7/​2009, 12-​02) was highly contested. One of the points that had to be discussed again in Parliament was the change from three to six months for the período experimental (probationary period) of each worker. This was approved in November 2008 but was then considered unconstitutional by the Tribunal Constitucional (Constitutional Court). The most controversial aspects of the new labour code were the creation of a banco de horas (bank of hours) and the role of unions. The banco de horas was a means of ‘banking’ an employee’s worked overtime rather than paying overtime wages. The ‘banked’ hours could then be allotted to the worker as time off in lieu on another day. This has particular importance for Portuguese workers given the low costs of labour. A  significant number of Portuguese workers used overtime pay as a means of increasing their monthly income. Therefore, by annulling the possibility of overtime pay the new labour code stimulated not only time flexibility but also wage flexibility, thereby reducing the costs of production. In terms of collective agreements, the new labour code established that collective agreements between unions and employers would expire after five years (instead of ten). It also allowed a worker to join a sectoral collective agreement of their own choice without being a union member. This change weakened the role of the unions at the level of the workplace and in society at large. In August 2008, in the midst of rising unemployment and social tensions, the then prime minister, José Sócrates, marked his political rentrée by publicly announcing the creation of an additional 1,200 jobs for 2009. These jobs would be created by the establishment of a new call centre for Portugal Telecom in Santo Tirso, a city in the northern interior with one of the highest rates of unemployment in the country, to be run in partnership with temporary work agencies and the Institute of Employment and Professional Training (Instituto do Emprego e Formação Profissional; IEFP). The call centre was to have 600 teleoperations positions dedicated to the provision of technical support to several of the companies belonging to the Portugal Telecom group. The public announcement of the creation of call centres outside the main cities is one example of the general movement of decentralisation occurring within the Portuguese call centre sector. During 2008 alone the creation of other call centres was announced: • April 2008 –​Teleperformance Portugal announces a partnership with Vodafone and the municipality of Covilhã for the construction of a call centre in the city. • August 2008 –​the daily newspaper Público announces the creation of a protocol between CHR, the Ministry of Labour and Social Solidarity, and the IEFP for the creation of two call centres in Guimarães. • September 2008  –​the public television station broadcasts a report about the creation of a social security call centre in the municipality of Castelo Branco. In an interview for the broadcast, the president of the municipality comments

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that ‘What matters is that there is employment. There is no job for life any more. That is the reality globalisation brings about –​there is just no job for life. What matters is that young people have a place to work and have their income.’ The call centre announced for Santo Tirso was later the target of a campaign carried out by Precários Infléxiveis, a social movement against casualisation, contesting that workers were being hired through a temporary work agency in what should be considered a permanent public service. This example, besides demonstrating the growing inclusion of call centre services in the public sector and the mobility of the service sector, also points to one prominent tendency in the geography of the sector in Portugal. The general strategy of decentralising call centres to impoverished areas of the country with high rates of unemployment among the young appears to have been successful for the companies, given that in these areas the stigma attached to call centre work was potentially less pronounced.10 Employers’ associations justify the growth of call centre labour because the call centre sector is a source of employment. The discourse of the employers’ association regarding the importance of the call centre industry in Portugal is mirrored by that of temporary work agencies, chronicles, and investigative articles published in management magazines and economic journals. First, they emphasise the importance of call centres in the creation of employment, often portraying them as work schools for integrating young people into the world of work. Second, they argue that young people will benefit tremendously from training sessions where they will develop important commercial skills for their future careers. Political parties of the left (Bloco de Esquerda (Left Bloc) and Partido Comunista Português) and trade unions criticised the public announcement of a call centre in Santo Tirso because what it created was not more employment but more precarious labour for the 500 euro generation. Against this background of social debate on the Government’s proposal and the reform of labour law the Bloco de Esquerda announced that it would hold a ‘Marcha contra a Precariedade’ (March against Precarity) between 12 and 21 September 2008. The march began where some of the telecommunications call centres are sited, in the eastern part of Lisbon at the Parque das Nações. A procession similar to those of the San Precario movement led the march. In this case, the demonstrators took the statue of São Vitalino, alluding to Vitalino Canas, member of the Socialist Party and chairman of a committee on temporary work agencies. The demonstrators were carrying a poster that proclaimed ‘Sou precário, em que posso ser útil?’ (‘I am a precarious worker, how may I help you?’), alluding directly to call centre workers (Figure 3.3). The same marchers also went to Porto, in the northern part of the country, where they visited the main call centres of the city. Austerity struggles over the morality of precarity Between 2008 and 2011 the effects of the financial crisis gained further amplification in Portugal. In 2010, in line with European Council Resolutions, the Government shifted from a fiscal-​stimulus political economy to austerity. Between

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3.3  The ‘Marcha contra a Precariedade’, Lisbon, 12 September 2008

2010 and 2011, a minority socialist Government implemented three austerity packages (which become known as ‘Pacto para a Estabilidade e Crescimento’ (Stability and Growth Programme) based on reducing the Government deficit and debt through tax increases, wage cuts and labour devaluation.11 In March 2011, a small group of activists and precarious workers called for a public demonstration of the Generation in Trouble, which later became known as the ‘Movimento 12 de Março’ (12 March Movement).12 In their manifesto activists called for:  ‘desempregados, “quinhentoseuristas” e outros mal remunerados, escravos disfarçados, subcontratados, contratados a prazo, falsos trabalhadores independentes, trabalhadores intermitentes, estagiários, bolseiros, trabalhadores-​ estudantes, mães, pais e filhos de Portugal’ (‘unemployed, “500-​Eurists” and other underpaid workers, disguised slaves, sub-​and short-​term-​hired, fake independent workers, intermittent workers, trainees, scholarship holders, working students, students, mothers, fathers and sons of Portugal’) to participate, while identifying themselves as ‘the highest-​qualified generation in the history of our country’.13 The demonstration took place in various cities spread throughout the country, and participation in Lisbon and Porto reached 300,000 people. The significance of the popular mobilisation of the Generation in Trouble contributed to an intensification of the social and political debate on the morality, meaning and legitimacy of increasing patterns of labour precarisation –​as seen through the expansion of the call centre sector. During a public meeting with the

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youth sector, the secretary-​general of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP), Jerónimo de Sousa, declared that the main problem for the Generation in trouble was that ‘today’s call centre operators are the factory workers of yesterday’, which confirmed the popular saying that ‘a worker will be the son of a worker, and a doctor will be the son of a doctor’.14 His comments signalled shared views among some critical sectors of Portuguese society. Specifically, his view of the generational embeddedness of class struggle envisioned precarity as enabling a conservative regression in patterns of social mobility, potentially leading to the erosion of labour-​based rights, entitlements and claims in the equalisation of opportunities among social classes. In the following years, a contrasting view would emerge that sought ideologically to rework the economic imperative of precarity and greater labour flexibility as a form of moral justice for young generations. In May 2011 the Portuguese Government, with the support of the main right-​ wing opposition parties, signed the Memorandum of Understanding with the Troika, a document laying out the conditions and terms under which the structural adjustment programme should be implemented between 2011 and 2014. As in other countries of the Southern European periphery, the austerity programme was centred mostly on measures of internal devaluation constituted by wage repression: employment precariousness, labour devaluation and mass unemployment. The alleged Portuguese ‘rigidity of employment protection’ again became the leitmotif to argue for further wage and labour flexibility, informing the legislation of law no. 23/​2012 (25-​06), which enabled ‘from one day to the other, through decree, a profound social regression, expressed in an immense transfer of income from labour to capital largely achieved through labour devaluation and an increase of the work time’ (Reis et al. 2013: 117). The law’s implementation facilitated the radicalisation and acceleration of the neoliberal reconfiguration of employment and labour relationships, through increased unpaid labour time, the decrease in the cost of overtime work, and weakened barriers to dismissal and job obsolescence (Lima 2014). The right-​wing coalition Government phrased the imperative of labour market flexibility as a way of abiding by the requirements imposed upon Portugal by the Troika. Simultaneously, both before and after the implementation of law no. 23/​2012 (25-​06), the economic imperative of labour flexibility was linked to a moral grammar of justification grounded on the idea that the excessive protection and privileges of older workers were preventing younger generations from accessing the labour market. The lack of work, stability and rights of precarious young workers were rhetorically articulated as the result of the excessive rights, protections and entitlements of older generations.15 Precarity was thus resignified as a morally based form of generational justice, a way of repairing the material and moral injustice to which young workers found themselves subject. Contrary to the narrative of generational justice, one of the significant consequences of law no. 23/​2012 (25-​06) was to reinforce the expansion and growth of precarious forms of employment, which in 2012 represented 30 per cent of total employment, with a particular concentration in the 15–​34 age group, where it was closer to 50 per cent (Estanque and Costa 2012). According to the Associação de Combate à Precariedade (Association against Precarity), since the first trimester of

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2012, precarious workers and unemployed citizens have constituted more than 50 per cent of the Portuguese labour force (Maciel 2012). It is in this context that the call centre sector emerges as either the ‘paradise of precarity’ or, again, the ‘land of opportunity’ for the dispossessed young generations in times of austerity. In 2013, with an unemployment rate close to 17 per cent, and 38 per cent among those below 25 years of age,16 Teleperformance opened its sixth call centre in the country, in Lisbon, where it publicly declared that it had invested €4  million in the creation of 1,400 jobs. The ministry of the economy attended the ceremony, stating that ‘[a]‌n investment that creates 1,400 jobs deserves to be underlined, especially in the difficult moment that the Portuguese economy is going through. This investment shows that Teleperformance believes in the recovery of the Portuguese economy’ (Faria 2013). News concerning the opening of such a large call centre, destined to provide services to the internal and external markets, circulated widely in the media, arousing a significant degree of controversy. Political parties on the left, trade unions and social activists against precarity criticised the support given by the Government, arguing that Portugal was becoming the ‘paradise of call centres’. This notion was mobilised to stress the deepening precarisation of employment conditions and labour devaluation in the country, particularly for the young.17 The sociologist Elisio Estanque labelled the productivist matrix enabled by the labour laws implemented in 2012 as a way of facilitating the return of slave labour: [T]‌he productivist matrix that inspired the legislator of the new labour code does not ask for the return of the satanic mills of the nineteenth century because they are no longer necessary. Thanks to the digital economy, call centres, telework and other technologies today it is possible to ensure more discreet and efficient forms of servitude.18

The call centre sector in Portugal has been, in recent years, one of the most politicised sectors of economic activity. Opposing political discourses have appropriated the call centre sector either to proclaim it as the primary source of employment creation or to demonise it as the primary locus for the growth of precarious employment. This political appropriation of the call centre sector, before and after the implementation of austerity measures, reveals how the legitimacy and meaning of precarity in Portugal have increasingly become an object of contestation set against the breakdown of a particular morality of reproduction grounded on intra-​generational expectations, mutual obligations and responsibilities. This morality, based on stable work and educational credentials, becomes a privileged site of struggle over the potential for emancipation or moral stigma attached to the condition of precarity and of those members of the precariat who work in the call centre sector. Conclusion In Portugal, the moral and relational dimensions of unfulfilled intra-​generational aspirations inform the struggles over the meaning and legitimacy of precarity, as represented by the call centre sector. They do so in such a way as to render the

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terminology of precarity a source of political emancipation or moral stigma. Media representations and narratives of call centres as icons of precarity portray the sector as either a ‘land of opportunity’ for youngsters or the main site of entrapment for the 500 euro generation. Following the 2008 financial crisis, call centre labour was mobilised as an instrument of critique vis-​à-​vis the acceleration of the neoliberal reconfiguration of employment relationships and labour conditions. The call centre sector and its young workforce have been placed at the core of moral and political struggles over the legitimacy and meaning of precarity. Call centre labour becomes a source of political agency for those seeking to criticise the material and moral dispossession of the highest-​qualified generation in democratic Portugal. Simultaneously, the work is also the ground on and against which the condition of precarity emerges as a potential moral stigma connected with the experience of imprisonment in a socially devalued, demeaning and degrading form of work. In contrast to perspectives that have emphasised either the novel (or primordial) character of precarious labour or a revolutionary and emancipatory potential role for the precariat, I  want to suggest that the political discourses and moral structures of relationality in which the categories of precarious labour, precarity and the precariat are embedded can be a source of both emancipation and stigma (the effects of such stigma in the call centre sector are addressed in Chapter 7). The ambivalent character and underlying tensions of the precarity terminology in Portugal are not the primary outcome of superimposed neoliberal public policies (e.g. increased labour market flexibility), while the rearrangement of the collective structures that sustain social life (the educational system, family life or the occupational system) identified by Guy Standing (2011: 7–​8) has led to the emergence of a global precariat. Moreover, the ambivalent character of the precarity terminology in Portugal emerges from how broader neoliberal labour restructuring processes intersect and become embedded in local and conjunctural political and economic developments. The media filter such intersection, political forces and social agents through particular ‘structures of feelings’ (Williams 1977), linked to kin, class and generation, which become constitutive of the moral struggles shaping the meaning of precarity and the emancipatory limits and capabilities of the precariat. The Portuguese reality suggests that it is premature to seek uniformity in the precariat via a general framework as a ‘class in the making’ (Standing 2011), particularly if this framework is grounded on general assumptions that may lead to the reification of the historical, moral and contingent dimensions shaping the emergence and development of the precariat –​including the Portuguese precariat working in the call centre sector. In the next four chapters, I focus on how the specific shape of Portuguese flexible capitalism, the disjuncture in historically bounded generational expectations (addressed in Chapter 2), and the ambivalence attached to the social and moral meanings of precarity are expressed in the call centre labour process. These chapters progressively unravel the institutionalisation of a system of labour exploitation that, as we have seen, I designate as a regime of disciplined agency. In the penultimate chapter I explore the human and social consequences of this regime for the precarious generation currently working in Portuguese call centres.

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Notes 1 The mass of texts, manifestos and propaganda produced by such social movements is immense, the large majority being available on the internet. Some of the main websites are: www.ecn.org/​chainworkers/​chainw/​english.htm (Italy, accessed March 2020), www. precarios.net/​ (Portugal, accessed March 2020), www.precarios.org (Spain, accessed February 2020), http://​fartosdestesrecibosverdes.blogspot.com/​ (Portugal, accessed February 2020), www.ac.eu.org/​(France, accessed February 2020) and www.sindominio. net/​karakola/​antigua_​casa/​precarias.htm (Spain, accessed February 2020). Specific publications devoted to the precariat and precarity are found in the multilingual issue devoted to the precariat in the journal Transversal (http://​republicart.net/​disc/​precariat/​ index.htm, accessed March 2020), the collection of articles published by Mute magazine in 2004–​05 (www.metamute.org/​en/​Precarious-​Reader) and the set of texts available at www.republicart.net/​. 2 See Mabrouki (2004) for a description of these events from the point of view of a union representative who had been working in the McDonald’s restaurant since 1993. 3 Among sociologists in particular the precarious work debate was glossed as the ‘end of work’ debate; see for instance Rifkin (1995) and Méda (1995). For a critique, see Procoli (2004) and Caffentzis (2003). 4 Following the 2008 financial crisis, Portugal signed up to a four-​year structural adjustment programme with the ‘Troika’ (i.e. the IMF, the ECB and the EU) in May 2011, which resulted in a €78 billion bailout on condition of severe cuts to State expenditure. Under a right-​wing coalition Government, harsh tax increases, spending cuts and reductions to welfare benefits shaped the programme’s implementation. Similarly to other countries on the indebted periphery of the Eurozone, the core Portuguese policies of austerity centred on measures of internal devaluation, mainly comprising wage repression, precarious employment, labour devaluation and mass unemployment. 5 According to the APCC (2019:  61), in 2018 the average gross monthly income of operators was estimated to be €796, which, after taxes and social security deductions, could very probably amount to a net monthly income of €550. In 2018 the national minimum wage was stipulated as €580 and in 2019 it rose to €600. 6 The ‘Geração 500 euros’ is the Portuguese equivalent of a term first coined by the Spanish daily newspaper El pais (23 October 2005), which published a report headlined ‘La generacion de los mil euros’ (‘The Generation of €1,000’), concerning overqualified young people aged around 30 with insecure jobs. Implicit in the report was the idea that a new social class was emerging designated the mileuristas (‘thousand euro-​ers’). In April 2008, the Portuguese daily newspaper Público published a similar report but dubbed this growing population of young people with precarious jobs ‘the new precariat’ (15 April 2008). According to the report, the Portuguese precariat constituted at the time around 28 per cent of the working population. This demographic group is characterised by temporary jobs in service work without recognition of the traditional forms of workers’ organisations such as trade unions and political parties. Recently, in Spain, a new label started to appear in newspapers as a substitute for the term ‘generacion de los mil euros’:  the ‘generacion ni-​ni’ (‘the neither-​nor generation’). The ‘generacion ni-​ni’ encompasses young people between 18 and 34 years old who are neither studying nor working. In 2010, in the UK, a Prince’s Trust survey of more than 2,000 young respondents aged between 16 and 25 concluded that the lack of work stability and expectations of livelihood improvement might lead to the emergence of a ‘lost generation’ (Guardian, 4 January 2010).

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7 The reportage is available at www.rtp.pt/​play/​p852/​bom-​dia-​em-​que-​posso-​ser-​util (accessed 9 February 2020). 8 In Portugal, collective bargaining emerged only after the Carnation Revolution. The first legislation regulating collective bargaining dates from 1979. In 1984 the Standing Council for Social Consultation, a national body for tripartite negotiation, was formed, not only to monitor labour disputes but also to consult social partners about economic and social policy. This council does not have decision-​making power but can be highly influential. In 2004, for the first time in Portugal’s history, a Labour Code was approved. 9 In 2004 a report published by the Organisation for Economic Co-​Operation and Development (OECD) judged that Portugal had the strongest legal employment protection among twenty-​seven countries; see OECD (2004). 10 As noted by Richardson and Belt (2001), while some decades ago service work could not be mobile, given the demand for face-​to-​face contact between producer and consumer, the impact of information and communication technologies has changed this: ‘by increasing the tradability across space of service activities, thus permitting the separation of production from consumption, ICTs are allowing a growing number of service firms to search for new sources of cheap labour, much in the way that the manufacturing sector has historically done, and thus to “(re) discover” the basic principles of national and international divisions of labour’ (69). 11 The national rate of unemployment rose from 7.6 per cent in 2008 to 12.7 per cent in 2011. In the cohort below 25 years of age, the rate of unemployment rose from 16.7 per cent in 2008 to 30.2 per cent in 2011; Pordata, www.pordata.pt/​(accessed August 2017). 12 This demonstration served as inspiration for the anti-​austerity movement in Spain known as the 15-​M Movement, which started in May 2011, organised mainly by social networks such as Real Democracy NOW (Democracia Real YA) and Youth without Future (Juventud sin Futuro). In Spain, anti-​ austerity demonstrations and social movements were consequential in the redefinition of the political spectrum, giving rise to the emergence of new political parties (e.g. Podemos). In contrast, in Portugal, the collective behind the organisation of the 12 March demonstration, later known as 12th M Movement, gradually disappeared and lost public visibility in the succeeding years. 13 See https://​geracaoenrascada.wordpress.com/​manifesto/​english/​ (accessed February 2020). 14 See  www.publico.pt/ ​ 2 011/ ​ 0 3/ ​ 2 7/ ​ p olitica/ ​ n oticia/ ​ j eronimo- ​ a ctualiza- ​ m arxis moleninismo-​aos-​operarios-​dos-​callcenters-​da-​geracao-​a-​rasca-​1486940 (accessed February 2020). 15 See, for instance, www.publico.pt/​2014/​02/​01/​politica/​opiniao/​discurso-​geracional-​e-​ guerra-​aos-​velhos-​1621906 (accessed February 2020). 16 Data obtained from the national statistical database Pordata; see www.pordata.pt/​ Portugal/​Taxa+de+desemprego+total+e+por+grupo+et%c3%a1rio+(percentagem)-​ 553 (accessed February 2020). 17 As mentioned earlier, the notion of Portugal as ‘the paradise of call centres’ preceded wider comment in the national and internal media that Portugal was becoming the ‘new Bangalore’ or ‘new India’ of Europe. See www.eleconomista.es/​empresas-​ finanzas/​noticias/​5633620/​03/​14/​Portugal-​se-​convierte-​en-​el-​call-​center-​de-​Europa-​ durante-​la-​crisis.html; http://​www.dw.com/​en/​is-​portugal-​the-​new-​india-​of-​europe/​ a-​17266320; https://​psmag.com/​economics/​lisbon-​the-​bangalore-​of-​europe (accessed February 2020). 18 See www.publico.pt/​2012/​08/​06/​j ornal/​as-​p ortas-​do-​t rabalho-​escravo-​25016437 (accessed February 2020) (italics in original).

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The moral economy of labourer production in call centres

In the first call I had to answer I was very nervous, I was completely shaking … it was the first time I was answering a call in a call centre … There is always a nervous feeling in the first call you answer, and it is worse when the client ‘comes on the line’ in a ‘killing mode’ … it was so complicated, I was very nervous, but then I was able to pull myself together. Manuel, call centre operator [How was your first call? Were you nervous?] It was horrible, I  was very nervous. It was my first job, it was my first call. What was the client going to ask? I am not going to be able to do it, I thought … [But why do you think you were so nervous?] I don’t know, everything was new to me. I was talking with a person that I had never met; she was going to ask me things that I didn’t know how to answer. I just kept thinking to myself, ‘I don’t know how to do anything’ … very strange. Sara, call centre operator

The institutional process through which someone becomes a call centre operator has a distinct stage comparable to a rite of passage: answering the first call. New candidates talk among themselves about how they will be able to speak to the first client. More experienced call centre operators remember how it was when they answered their first call. Some remember being so nervous that their legs were shaking, others that they had perspired so much that afterwards they had gone outside to take some air and dry out or smoke a cigarette. There were several cases of people on the verge of tears because they thought they would never be able to do the job properly. Why do operators attribute such importance to this first task? Why is it so common to share the understandings and experiences concerning this ‘rite’? What happens before answering the first call? To answer these questions, in this chapter I  explore how call centres present their hiring, recruitment, training and job allocation practices to those seeking employment with them. I first look at the process of recruitment, focusing on the desirable skills for the job and how both employers and future workers interpret these, and the process of training and inducting someone into the call centre. I then

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describe the main consequences of management interventions in the transactions among call centre operators, team leaders and clients. Finally, I demonstrate how the division of the workforce inside the call centre –​between ‘internal’ (i.e. permanent) and ‘external’ (i.e. temporary) workers –​is built on another division, that between the client and the company. My aim in this chapter is to emphasise some of the processes that are involved in ‘learning to be a call centre operator’ from the moment the individual applies for the job until he or she enters the workplace. These processes are anchored in specific procedures that establish specific modes of conduct and behaviour through which subjectivities are organised and disciplined in the early stages of learning the job. The processes the trainees (and later workers) go through reveal how emotions, bureaucracy and hierarchy are framed in the organisation of work. These processes disclose a moral economy of labourer production within the Portuguese call centre sector, in which operators are positioned, valued, evaluated, and envisioned as potential containers of subordination and agency. Recruitment: skills, docility and autonomy In Portugal, the recruitment process in the telecommunications call centre sector is carried out by both the temporary work agency (TWA) and the user firm (e.g. EVA).1 The former performs psychometric and personality tests, and the latter carries out individual interviews with candidates. Both stages seek out, from the point of view of employers, the ideal characteristics that candidates should possess in order to be eligible for the post. The TWA carries out the first stage of selection, consisting of two formal tests. The first is a psychometric test, which is supposed to ensure that the candidate can reason mathematically and logically. This may include a personality test, which is supposed to evaluate the capacity of the candidate for dealing with stressful situations. A further test checks the typing speed of each candidate. Candidates repeatedly describe this test ironically, as they consider it ‘too basic’; what is asked is so simple, they say, that almost everyone could do it. The individual interviews are carried out by the user firm. User firms are especially interested in hiring college/​university students or candidates with a college degree who are looking for a part-​time job. The user firm expects that such candidates will have useful skills for the job such as the ability to speak foreign languages, extensive knowledge of IT, and an ability to converse in a clear and informed manner. These interviews take place in the company building where the call centre is located. The questions posed to candidates are meant to ensure two qualities: general technical competence in computing and, most importantly, the sort of personality that management regards as indispensable in a call centre operator. The following section details a typical interview session carried out by the team coordinator of EVA. The two candidates were both originally from Lisbon, aged between 20 and 25. Both were looking for part-​time jobs that could be carried out while studying at university. The questions in both interviews included ‘Do you have any previous experience in call centre work?’, ‘Do you know how to work with application X and Y?’ and ‘Could you please tell me three aspects of your personality that you

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like and dislike?’. The first candidate was thinking about going to university to do a course in management studies and was responsible for a branch of a charity that provides social support to vulnerable populations in Portuguese rural areas. He had previous work experience in a call centre at another company. The team coordinator tried to understand what kind of experience he had at the other call centre, as well as how work was organised there. The typical questions included ‘I was informed that in X company, when the average call-​time is too high, the team leaders end the calls. Is that right? How did you react to that?’, ‘How would you react if someone made a very strong and rude criticism of you at a highly stressful moment?’, ‘Were there situations when irate customers began talking with you on the phone in a very harsh way and how did you react to that?’ and ‘What do you think is more important, to solve the problem posed by the client or to control the average call-​time?’. For the team coordinator, the most significant question was the one about the ‘normal’ attitudes of team leaders at the other company when the average call-​ time was too high for the usual standard. In such situations, said the candidate, the team leader would listen in on the client and the operator. The operator then had to listen to both the team leader and the client. The candidate did not show any disapproval of this practice, although he remarked that sometimes ‘it was very confusing to be listening to two persons at the same time’. To the question as which is more important, the quality of the solution for the client’s problem or the average call-​time, the answer given by the candidate was that he considered both important: the former because he understood the client’s impatience to solve the problem as ‘I am also a client myself ’, and the average call-​time because he understood that companies have their internal procedures and that they usually give workers the necessary tools in the workplace to achieve the desired targets. The second candidate was studying computer engineering at university and did not have any previous work experience in the call centre sector. Again, the team coordinator asked the question ‘Which aspects of your personality do you like and dislike most?’. He replied that his best quality was his propensity to help family and friends in solving computing problems. What he disliked most was, in one word, stubbornness. The team coordinator proceeded with questions aimed at finding out the candidate’s opinion of call centre work: ‘Do you like speaking on the phone?’, ‘Do you imagine yourself spending five hours speaking on the phone?’, ‘Do you have friends or relatives who have any experience of working in a call centre?’, ‘What did they tell you about their work?’. This candidate was more evasive when answering the questions, making an effort to control any undesirable information about himself that he might not wish to reveal. He emphasised his skills in terms of flexibility, adaptability and team-​working. Both the questions and the answers given reveal more of the kind of individual and personality demanded by the user firm than they do about learnt or acquired skills for a specific craft. That is, the company wants a person who is emotionally self-​disciplined (as displayed in reactions to harshness and rudeness from the clients), but also someone who uses their own initiative and abilities in a reflexive and autonomous manner, in alignment with the overall logic of the call centre labour process (i.e. identifying

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whether it is more important to resolve the problem posed by the client or to control the average call-​time). In the interviews, both candidates showed a docility in temperament and attitude that pleased the team coordinator very much, as he later remarked while we were having coffee. Besides the docility, other aspects he emphasised as being positive for a good performance as a ‘call centre assistant’ were flexibility with clients and hierarchical leaders, and the abilities to adapt swiftly to new circumstances and to work in a stressful environment. All the characteristics the team coordinator discussed in our conversation contributed to the user firm’s principal goals:  achieving a docile workforce (Foucault 1977), as needed by the company, but also a workforce who would use themselves as tools of the labour process by exercising autonomy in decision-​making, calculation and improvising solutions –​ in sum, an ‘enterprising self ’: that is, ‘a calculating self, a self that calculates about itself and that works upon itself in order to better itself ’ (Rose 1992: 146). The training process The complete training process that TWAs provide for future call centre operators usually takes between one and two weeks. During the training, the user firm gives recruits a brief introduction to its business and to the software applications that will be their primary tools of work, and informs them of the details of their contractual conditions of employment. During the training week candidates also get acquainted with their future colleagues, some of whom may have previous experience of call centre work. The exchange of experiences among recruits is important because it is also through such informal interaction that they learn how to be ‘good call centre operators’. Getting into the ‘group spirit’, uncertainty and powerlessness The room where the training session took place was roughly 30 m2, with the tables in college style, positioned in a circle in the centre, around which the trainer could walk and talk to the audience. The first thing the trainer mentioned was that the area coordinator was indeed a ‘nice guy’ because he had a lot of ‘group/​team spirit’. I had previously been instructed about the importance of this ‘team spirit’ without knowing that it would be a recurrent theme of work at the call centre. The trainer, Luís, added that at EVA there was excellent cooperation among people, something that was essential to carrying out good work. Luís had been working at EVA for three years. He began as a call centre operator and then was invited to join the training team of the TWA. Luís began the first day of training by asking if everyone already knew one another. In order for the new group of trainees to get acquainted a game was played. It consisted of the following: Luís distributed a set of provérbios populares (popular sayings) adapted to the vocabulary of new technologies. Each sentence was divided into two parts. Every trainee chose one of the parts and had to find the

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colleague who held the second part, at which point each had to introduce the other to the group. This game was played by everyone with humour and was used as a way of dissipating shyness and apprehension. Using games as a strategy to create the sense of a cohort among recruits was also identified by Bear (2007) in her ethnography of international call centre operators in India. The ‘manufacturing of friendship’ serves several purposes both during and after the training period. First, it establishes paternalistic control of the workforce, manifest in the atmosphere of infantilisation to which operators are exposed. Second, it creates the illusion of authentic ‘team spirit’ based on ties of friendship that are not limited to the workplace. As I show in the next chapter, ‘team spirit’ is central to management in achieving competition among peers and exploiting work to the maximum. That is, the friendship relationship established among workers under the umbrella of ‘team spirit’ is one of the factors that contributes to the productive output of each team, even though the relationship may be fraught. A session of questions and answers followed the game. Luís asked the group if there were doubts or questions the candidates would like to ask. Although the majority of those present at the session had already signed their training contracts, the doubts were unexpectedly related to wages, work shifts, leave days and the possibility of career progress: namely, the possibility of being hired by EVA instead of the TWA. These questions were left unanswered by Luís, who explained that an administrative member of the TWA was coming to provide a clarification session on one of the training days. On the third day of training, an administrative member from the TWA came in to address these doubts. She began by informing the recruits of the wages offered to a full-​time operator (8 hours per day, 5 days per week). The basic salary was €415 per month, with a daily food allowance of €4.70 plus a bonus of €115 dependent on the number of delays and absences at work.2 One unjustified absence from work, or having more than thirty minutes of lateness during the month, would immediately annul the possibility of achieving this bonus. After deducting the required contributions for social security, each worker would earn between €550 and €600 per month. Three months after being engaged, workers would be eligible for a productivity award (€50), which was dependent on factors such as average call-​ time, number of calls answered per day and monthly quality evaluations. During my fieldwork, it became clear that the targets set out for each of these items made it very difficult to earn the award. Given that some of the present recruits were also students at the university, the TWA officer explained how to obtain the status of trabalhador-​estudante (working student). Trabalhadores-​estudantes are legally entitled to be absent from work during the day of any exam and the day before. The TWA deals with the problem of long absences due to exams by paying double time to any trabalhador-​estudante who comes to work on an exam day or the preceding day. The officer’s explanation of how the monthly payments were made aroused discussion in the group. At the end of every two weeks, each worker would have to hand in their folha de horas (timesheet). The salary received at the end of the month was made up of payment for the first two weeks of the current month and the last two weeks of

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the previous month. Given that the group was beginning its training in the second week of January, at the end of the month the new operators would receive only the training-​period payment.3 This would mean that they were going to receive their first full salary only after two months of work. One of the trainees, feeling completely helpless and outraged by such a method of payment, could not help saying ‘But how do you expect me to pay my bills if I am only going to receive money at the end of two months? How am I going to pay for my bus pass? How am I going to pay my car insurance?’. All of his colleagues, either by speaking or through silent body language, showed their agreement and considered that this system of payment was unfair and arbitrary. At the same time, they also emphasised their powerlessness when confronting the TWA. As one of the candidates remarked, ‘Tens que comer e engolir senão o teu nome fica queimado junto da X e nunca mais te dão trabalho!’ (‘You have to eat and swallow this because otherwise your name gets burnt and they will never give you work again!’). Trainees also raised the question of the type of employment contract made by the TWA with workers. ‘What kind of contract are we going to have?’ was repeated often, and the answer was obvious: ‘Look, X is a temporary work agency, which means we only make temporary contracts of employment.’ Someone insisted on asking if there were circumstances where permanent contracts were offered, and the answer did not leave any room for doubt: ‘My dears, employment for life is a myth –​it doesn’t exist any more!’. This sentence was followed by a passionate defence of flexible labour relations as good for both employer and employees. She linked her defence to visions of a greater sense of freedom and the possibility of experimenting with new career options. Someone asked ironically, ‘Well, in that case, can you explain to me why the majority of people still prefer to have a permanent employment contract to a temporary one? Do you mean to say that there aren’t social advantages in having a permanent contract?’. This question was left unanswered, the TWA officer offering only the paternalistic remark: ‘Don’t worry about that [temporary contracts of employment]. If we understand that you are devoted and professional workers, we are not going to let you go. Some people have been working with us for more than five years!’. This statement, among many others, confirmed the trainees’ fears of becoming ‘permanent temporary workers’, fears repeated many times either in informal talks or interviews concerning work and life prospects.4 Being a ‘professional assistant’ and automatism The clarification session involved tension and suspicion among the group of trainees, something that remained ever present during the rest of the training week. This also involved brief reviews of the history of the expansion of the firm for which they were going to work, the products and services provided by the business, and the software applications that would be their daily working tools. The trainees were also warned persistently about what could and could not be said to clients during a phone call. When the trainer described the products, services and tools of work, some terms were in English (‘call on hold’; ‘script’; or ‘CTI’, which means computer

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telephony integration). He emphasised the connection between these words and the complex technological devices they were meant to describe. In the training sessions, Luís always emphasised the technical aspect of the job as a way to distinguish it from a regular commercial helpline. In her research conducted in Barbados into the growing high-​tech service industry known as ‘offshore informatics’, Carla Freeman (1998, 2000) describes how supporters of the industry ‘emphasise its clean and clerical, professional white-​collar setting, and take pains to disassociate it from traditional factory work’ (1998:  247). She also points out that the computer is understood as an icon of modernity that ‘feeds into a long tradition privileging education as the source of upward mobility, and heightens this ethic with the hyperbolic sense of technological advancement’ (258). Moreover, the computer is a sign of progress, and represents the future for the workers Freeman researched. As a ‘clean’, white-​collar occupation, office work is distinct from agriculture and manufacturing. The same symbolism is attached to the computer and to the technical language of informatics to which call centre operators are exposed both during the training period and later within the setting of the workplace. Trainees were informed they would have to manage eleven distinct software applications to do their work. As the call centre provided technical support to telephone and internet services, the information needed to ascertain the causes of any problems and how to correct them had to be checked with several sources. The high number of applications to be used during one phone call raised the issue of the difficulty of talking with the client while at the same time searching the pages on screen for relevant information. Concerns were aroused among trainees as to how to achieve the desirable synchrony between speech and hand movement, given the warning that after three months of working they would have to hit quantitative targets: a specific average call-​time, a specific average time for leaving the client on hold, a specific average number of answered calls per day etc. Regarding the trainees’ concerns about how to coordinate their speech and movements the trainer commented: ‘You don’t need to worry, after a while it becomes automatic.’ A summary of the function of each application and how to use it was provided. For instance, one of the applications has to be filled with data on each call answered. Operators have to describe the problem posed by the client and the solution found. The same application measures the times of the operator’s work shift and breaks. This information prompted several questions, including ‘How much time per day can we use as break?’ and ‘How can we manage our break?’. The answer was that operators working full-​time have thirty minutes’ break, and those in part-​time work fifteen minutes. In an environment similar to that found in primary schools the training proceeded in the form of work groups. The trainer explained that once working as ‘assistants’ they would have access to an intranet that contained all necessary information about products and services provided by the firm. Trainees were then divided into pairs. Each pair had to choose one service or product and present it to the entire group, role-​playing the call centre operators explaining services and products to clients. Amid a mix of shyness and humour, the session revealed to the

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future ‘assistants’ that within a very short period they would have to learn a considerable amount of information.

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Being ‘inducted’ as a new ‘assistant’ and learning with coworkers Once the trainees have finished the part of their training that takes place outside the call centre, they do an ‘induction’ week inside the workspace. This is the first contact the future ‘assistants’ have with the call centre environment, the particular team of which they will become a part and how work is organised. During this week, coworkers, especially more experienced operators, play a decisive role in reproducing the ‘assistant’ role. This is done not only by demonstrating the role of the submissive and disciplined worker as demanded by management, but also by displaying important strategies for taking ‘control of the call’, as I explain later. One apparent paradox of the call centre is that it is simultaneously pervaded by a kind of noise and a kind of silence. When entering any call centre for the first time, one is exposed to the constant noise above everyone’s heads. The room is filled with geometrically delineated rows of separate cabinets, each occupied by a human presence, a computer and a telephone. At the same time, there is a persistent silence among the operators because each of them is talking with clients. The cabinets act as a barrier of silence between workers. What one sees when looking at the spatial arrangement of the call centre is not noise but silence. The spatial architecture of the call centre is also prone to disciplinary modes of conduct and behaviour by establishing visible limits for movement and social interaction. For instance, the rows of cabinets are positioned so that operators sit with their backs to each other, facing a computer screen that prevents them from seeing the colleague in the opposite row. Figure  4.1 shows a plan of the call centre where I  undertook my fieldwork, showing the prominently geometrical arrangement of the workplace.5 New assistants encountering the call centre landscape for the first time do not immediately notice this paradox of sound for two reasons. Many people seeking employment in call centres have previous working experience in the sector, so they are ‘naturally familiar’ with this kind of environment; in other words the failure to see the paradoxical aspect of the call centre environment stems from having internalised the arbitrariness of the workspace as ‘natural and taken for granted’ (Bourdieu 1990 [1972]:  164). Thus, workers do not get attached to their workspace as a ‘space of their own’. There are no traces of individualised spaces at call centres, such as pictures or personal objects on desks. Workers do not have a permanent desk; usually, they occupy whatever cabinet is available after colleague has ended their shift. To this extent, workers contribute to the reproduction of the call centre landscape as an alien environment that subordinates the human presence and its traces. Once inside the centre, future workers are informed about the structure of the team and how work is organised. Every unit is divided into two groups, one designated as ‘front-​office’ and the other as ‘back-​office’. Employees’ main function in ‘front-​office’ work is to answer calls. ‘Back-​office’ work involves processing the

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KEY A – Eating room B – Meetings and training room C – Technical infrastructure of the call centre D – Toilets 4.1  Plan showing the layout of the call centre at EVA

clients’ complaints, sending these on to the appropriate department and contacting clients whenever further information is needed. Technically speaking, call centres usually allocate the vast majority of the workforce to dealing with incoming calls, and the smaller part to outgoing calls, although some specific units deal with only one type of call. The work of team leaders is to provide assistance to operators, compile monthly reports on team productivity and monthly qualitative evaluations of operators, and to ensure ‘good behaviour and conduct’ among assistants. During the ‘induction’ week team leaders are also responsible for providing additional training to future ‘assistants’ in the commercial services provided by the company, and in technical and ‘behavioural’ matters. Team leaders emphasise that ‘assistants’ should show that they are ‘professionals’ in their work by mastering technical competencies, thus showing that they know more of the subject than the clients do. ‘Assistants’ should also be capable of doing a ‘visual reconstruction’, despite the telephone

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barrier, of what is physically happening on the other end of the line. ‘Assistants’ should show politeness towards the clients. Team leaders insist that operators must be ready to listen to a lot of angry customers during their shifts, but they should not forget the importance of ‘being polite’ and ‘showing a smile in their voices’. As one team leader remarked, ‘angry customers are not discontented with you, they are discontented with the company’, adding ‘you should not take it personally’. The demand for depersonalisation was also found by Arlie Hochschild (1983) among flight attendants, and was one of their primary sources of frustration and distress. That is, in order to sound real while pretending not to take to heart such personal matters as being insulted by a client, the worker has to develop forms of self-​discipline.These include the trainer’s suggestion to ‘become automatic’, which again resembles an expression encountered by Hochschild: ‘go into robot’. Not all call centre operators adhere to this technique, and neither did the flight attendants studied by Hochschild, but this does not change the fact that a part of the self is disciplined through management prescriptions. According to Hochschild: Workers who refuse to perform emotional labour are said to ‘go into robot’. They withhold deep acting and retreat to surface acting. They pretend to be showing feeling. Some who take this stance openly protest the need to conduct themselves in this way. ‘I’m not a robot’, they say, meaning ‘I’ll pretend, but I won’t try to hide the fact that I am pretending. (1983:129)

The ‘induction model’ is further brought into effect by involving the new assistants with their coworkers. Being inducted into the team and getting to know future coworkers is a twofold process designated by user firms as ‘side-​by-​side’ and ‘on-​the-​job’ training. ‘Side-​by-​side’ means that the trainee answers the calls by themselves and logs all the information, while the senior operator gives support with technical details and advises on necessary corrections. ‘On-​the-​job’ training means that the trainee stays with a senior operator listening to their calls for a period of time equal to their future shift. These devices for inducting new operators into their teams and rhythms of work are typical in call centres. The description in the next section reveals how the induction processes of ‘side-​by-​side’ and ‘on-​the-​job’ training serve to produce the role of the submissive and disciplined worker as demanded by management, and also of the agentive worker, who devises strategies to cope with it. Getting rid of emotions At EVA’s call centre most of the calls are complaints because, as it is a technical support helpline, most clients only call when they are experiencing a problem with their services.6 When giving ‘on-​the-​job’ training most senior operators suggest to the new trainees that it is advisable to ‘get rid of emotions’ in order to protect themselves. A revealing episode –​which occurred while one of the new trainees was having ‘on-​the-​job’ training with a senior operator –​portrays how and why call centre operators reproduce the mechanism of ‘going into robot’. Maria was a two-​year veteran of the call centre, considered by the majority of her male colleagues to have become an excellent operator in the sense of being

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able to ‘controlar a chamada’ (control the call) well.7 One of the calls answered by Maria –​on the day the recruit was having on-​the-​job training with her –​was from a client complaining about a breakdown in his internet service for the last three days. This was a corporate client, whose levels of complaint are often very intense. These ‘angry customers’ usually complain about the negative impact the internet fault is having on their business. Being obliged to follow the usual procedures, Maria had to ask the client to run some tests while on the phone with her. He had already called the line more than six times before, which meant that Maria was asking him to repeat with her the same procedures he had already done (owing to the compulsory troubleshooting script operators have to follow). The client replied that he did not want to do this, and for twenty minutes Maria insisted the tests had to be done and that she was obliged to do them. After this time, she pressed the ‘mute’ button on the telephone and said: ‘This week I was having such a good average call-​time … now this call will ruin everything’. The client’s comment was: ‘I don’t think you quite understand what I am saying to you! You must have your words all memorised … Did you ever have a Linksys on your hands? I know more about routers than you will ever know!’.8 When the caller finally agreed to run the tests, Maria informed him that it would be necessary to wait for ten minutes while the connection was being restored, and added: ‘Mr X, if you don’t have any more questions, we can terminate the call now’, to which he replied: ‘If it is going to take ten minutes to solve the problem you will stay with me on the line and I will stay with you!’. After ten minutes of silence, Maria was able to finish the call. I asked her opinion about the clients who are not willing to perform the tests necessary to resolve their problems. She replied, ‘You know, when clients call us they are more emotional than rational; they explain that to us in a psychological training session … To protect yourself you need to be a machine! In the beginning, I was very emotional, but with time you learn that it works better if you don’t reply.’ How to domesticate clients The new assistant who was having on-​the-​job training with Maria was unable to disguise the fact that he was nervous, although it was not he who had just talked with the client. In the next call, Maria tried to show that assistants may also sometimes have a certain margin of autonomy in order to ‘domesticate’ the clients’ conduct towards them. This can be done, for instance, by leaving the client on hold for longer than necessary. During the time the client is waiting he ‘calms down’ –​an expression used by Maria –​and the operator can rest for a while. Nevertheless, for a technical support line complaints are routine, and commonly, after an angry attack, a client may finish by saying ‘I know it’s not your fault; I know that you are only an assistant; you only say what you are told to say …’. Even this recurrently humiliating sentence is used by operators to ‘domesticate’ the client’s behaviour towards them:  more experienced operators use the excuse of being ‘only an assistant’ for not helping the clients to access certain data, especially when they are rude towards operators. While following the

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on-​the-​job training of another candidate, a senior operator explained this in the following terms: A few days ago, during some weekend, there was a client to whom I  was not authorised to give confidential data on the phone. He said ‘You are all a bunch of motherfuckers!’. Usually during the weekends we ease up a bit and are a bit more helpful, because I have to be honest, it’s not the client’s fault that during the weekend there is no-​one here to take care of the matter. It’s not the client’s fault. But in situations like this, when they are arrogant with me, I am going to be even more arrogant. And he is not going to get anything more from me. After all, I am only an assistant who is following rules …

In this case, the operator informed the client that he was ‘only an assistant’ and was not authorised by the company, for the client’s security, to reveal this data on the phone. He also added that he was obliged to follow the procedure established by the company.9 These coping strategies reflect individual operators’ responses to problems arising with customers, but the techniques are also built into the procedures outlined in the scripts provided by the employers. The process of work, bureaucracy and dysfunctions Every operator’s work on a technical helpline can be summarised as ‘to provide technical support for clients’. Beyond that simple description, however, there are structures of negotiation involving not just workers and clients, but interventions by bureaucratic interests that are sometimes overt, often covert. After the induction week, these are the first aspects of the call centre work process with which new ‘assistants’ become acquainted. In this section, I explore some of the effects of rationalisation and standardisation on the work process. I show how the organisational structure in which EVA’s call centre is situated is legitimised by the ‘client paradigm’ and how this, in turn, shifts authority from the company to the client. The authority and control exerted over call centre operators are expressed through a set of procedures that have to be followed during work. These procedures also indicate the dysfunctions to which both operators and clients are systematically exposed in the call centre work organisation. The sovereign client, the ‘face of the company’ and the militarisation of call centre work The designation of the user firm’s department in which the call centre is located is that of ‘customer department’, which is divided into three units: ‘contact unit’, ‘development unit’ and ‘operations unit’. The first comprises the call centres. Operators have no contact with other units; their knowledge of the company is restricted to the functions they perform at the call centre. Each unit is allotted specific functions and tasks, and contacts between units are mainly through email. According to the team coordinator the division of areas in the ‘customer department’ is modelled on the client’s departmental organisation. That is, from the first

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moment a client activates a given service, the ‘contact unit’ should ensure the support necessary to secure their satisfaction and loyalty. The client then becomes involved with EVA’s company culture and its other services. The ‘development units’ should ensure necessary quality in the training for ‘collaborators’, write up what products and services the company is offering on the intranet, and manage contracts with the associated outsourcing companies (the TWAs). By this time, it should be a faithful customer. The ‘operations unit’ should ensure that billing complaints are clarified, analysed and dealt with. According to the team coordinator, call centres are vital because they are the ‘face of the company’. The coordinator also reiterated that the stipulated procedures are essential in order to ensure that clients are satisfied with the service provided. These procedures encompass all the actions taken in the course of work in order to answer clients’ complaints or requests for information. That is, there is a procedure that establishes what to do in terms of troubleshooting every service anomaly presented by clients, a procedure for how to write an email requesting information from other departments, etc. Then there is also a set of informal procedures. These are not laid down in written form but are informally instigated in various ways. So often the implementation of a new procedure is met with some resistance from workers. For instance, soon after the beginning of my fieldwork, operators were informed (by email) that they were not allowed to get up from their seats when they needed to consult the team leader about something. They should instead phone one of the team leaders and, without moving from their seats, raise their question or concern. The area coordinator informed the operators that this new procedure had been planned by the operations unit and was necessary, given the great number of people working in the same space and the need to be organised so as not to disrupt colleagues’ work. From the operators’ point of view, however, getting up from their seats and approaching a team leader was not justified purely in terms of ensuring ‘client satisfaction’. Rather, it presented an opportunity to get up, stretch one’s legs, take advantage of a short walk to chat with colleagues, and on arriving at the team leader’s desk take the time to discuss some other issue besides the client’s problem. Actually, in most of the situations, these encounters presented themselves as opportunities for humour, gossip and small talk –​after which the client’s problem was handled. The justification given by the area coordinator for this new procedure hid one of its practical objectives: efficient control of the bodies that occupy the call centre space. This paramilitary organisation of the work process resonates with the ‘iron cage’ described by Max Weber (1978 [1930]: 181), as well as the processes of disciplining the body described by Foucault (1977). However, unlike some workers who have undergone such discipline, temporary workers who work within this regime now do so without any expectation of the reward of a lifetime’s career in the organisation. They resemble what Richard Sennett (2006) described as ‘uncaged’ workers, that is, workers who have to show dedication and devotion to the ‘sovereign client’ as if they were an integral and permanent part of the company to

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which they give not only voice but ‘a face’. At the same time, they have to adjust to short-​term and uncertain plans of work and life.

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Procedures, authority and dysfunctions The imposition of standardised and routine procedures is not restricted to the transactions between operators and clients but can also be used to ensure authority over the operators. When operators arrive at the workplace, they must clock in to a software application that registers their time of arrival. They use the same program to register when they take a break or lunch and to clock out from the shift. During my fieldwork, a new procedure was implemented. Besides registering on the program, operators also had to start signing their names along with their clocking times. A team leader questioned the need for another procedure ‘if the machine has already captured this information’. The answer given by the TWA coordinator was that it was necessary ‘andar sempre em cima deles’ (to be always on top of them). After operators signed the form, the team leader had then to confirm that each piece of information on paper was in accord with the information provided by the software application (‘the machine’). This task took the team leader around two hours a day. Having a procedure for every action taken during work extracts both the worker and his labour from every context, every circumstance, every task and every interaction, and can sometimes lead to dysfunctional results in the course of providing a solution to the client’s problem. These dysfunctional results are most evident when workers encounter circumstances that have no procedure to follow. As an example, during a call, one of the operators was faced with a situation that was not covered by the information on the intranet. He then called the team leader to ask for advice. Not knowing what to do, the team leader sent an email to a superior requesting guidance. He suggested the operator tell the client that he should call back in an hour. An hour later the client called and asked to speak to the same operator, who was now engaged with another client, and the operator who answered this second call tried in vain to transfer it back to him. A couple of hours later the client called again, was connected with a third operator and asked a further time to speak with the original employee. He was informed that this worker had finished his shift for that day. The third operator tried to contact the team leader to find out if there was anything he could do, but the team leader had also finished his shift for the day and had sent an email to the original operator saying what the client should do. The client was then advised to call again the next day again: he would therefore be without internet until then. The next day the client called again and, at his request, the call was transferred to the original team member. This operator had now received an email saying that the client was advised to call another line because the problem was not technical: he was without internet because of a missing payment. The operator could not tell the client how much the debt was because technical staff are not authorised to access the billing databases.

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Both the operator and the client are entities who have been cut off from a process that embeds them in routines which have to be followed when the answer to a specific situation is not predetermined. The labyrinthine event described above is a recurrent feature in the job of a call centre operator. It is also a portrait of how the disembodied interaction (as opposed to face-​to-​face encounters) among operators, management and clients in call centre transactions have specifically alienating regulations that contradict the company’s most widely advertised slogan: ‘We communicate with our customers’. The call centre client and the call centre operator are trapped in a shared virtual space; ‘they are both helpless when it comes to changing the rules of the encounter’ (Huws 2009: 2). Such alienating regulations are also inscribed in one other recurrent situation. The ultimate threat made by an ‘angry client’ to an operator is ‘Let me speak to your supervisor’. This is usually accompanied by the question ‘What’s your name again?’, during which the operator listens in the background to the sound of a pen scribbling something on a bit of paper. Team leaders usually avoid speaking to clients, not only to reaffirm their status as team leaders but also because the problems referred to them entail highly time-​consuming calls, especially when the team leader themselves does not have the tools to solve the problem. When a supervisor is requested, the operator gets up and goes directly to the team leader to ask for their help. Junior operators are faced with the question from the team leader ‘Are you not aware of the procedure for this situation?’, immediately followed by ‘You should take note of the contact details of the client and tell him that the team leader will contact him in due course.’ Team leaders’ pedagogical questions are often met with distress by the operators, who have to return to their places and improvise some answer. During their work, operators gradually become aware of the importance of ‘procedures’. Internal politics and hierarchy: ‘internal’ vs ‘external’ workers Earlier I  described how the ‘customer department’ of the user firm is internally modelled on the departmental organisation of the client and divided into three main areas (‘contact units’, ‘operations units’ and ‘development units’) that are supposed to ensure the client’s loyalty to the firm. On the call centre shop floor, hierarchy and authority are exercised through the specialisation of each area’s function. Authority is also exercised by the division between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ workers, a division into which the tasks of the call centre operator and interpersonal contacts inside the workplace, as well as the transactions established with the client on the phone, are fitted. As we have seen, this categorisation is used among workers and management to distinguish the permanent from the temporary workers. The distinction is further anchored in the barrier between ‘the client’ and ‘the call centre’. This emblematic distinction is represented in Figure 4.2. The dichotomy between ‘internal’/​permanent and ‘external’/​precarious workers differentiates between two sets of employees with different obligations, benefits

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THE CLIENT Contact Units Director (permanent workers) Sub-directors -residential and corporate segment of clients (permanent workers) Area coordinator (permanent workers) Team coordinator (permanent workers)

Team leaders (temporary agency workers) ‘Back-office Assistants’ (Operators) (temporary agency workers) ‘Front-line Assistants’ (Operators) (temporary agency workers) THE CALL CENTRE

4.2  Graphic representation of ‘the client’ and ‘the call centre’ at EVA

and status (which are expressed, for instance, in leisure activities promoted by the user company to which only internal workers are invited, or in special training sessions to develop skills among the group of permanent workers that are not open to temporary workers). Although management deploys several strategies (explored in the next chapter) in order to obfuscate this difference and secure consent from ‘external’ workers, at the same time it reinforces the division to ensure subordination and consent from both groups of workers. That is, the distinction between internal and external workers is not presented as an immutable condition. Rather, the status of internal worker is held up as one that has to be attained

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and defended through ‘investment’ in work activities, ‘professionalism’, ‘dedication’ and ‘fidelity’ to the values of the company. At EVA’s call centre this was most pronounced in my conversations with both the team coordinator and the area coordinator. They both emphasised the obstacles of having to manage and organise a group of workers to whom legally they cannot talk directly. For instance, the area coordinator highlighted the fact several times that legally he cannot directly order operators to perform a specific task; he has to talk first with the team leader and ask him to approach a given operator. The insistence on this point was not because he does not agree with EVA’s use of temporary work. It was because EVA transfers the responsibility of dealing with the temporary workforce to him without giving him the formal means he needs to do it. Informally, both the team coordinator and the area coordinator are compelled to manage by improvisation, while formally behaving according to the ‘internal’ vs ‘external’ division. Either in circumstances directly arising from work, or during breaks, both permanent and temporary workers, when in the presence of senior directors, display the expected qualities of ‘professionalism’, ‘dedication’ and ‘loyalty’. When directors or members from other departments visit the call centre, operators are instructed to sit straight in their chairs, to avoid getting up and talking to colleagues, and to ‘keep their composure’. In the same vein, permanent workers alter the usual informal tone with which they approach operators and team leaders. Thus, ‘impression management’ in the call centre implies a ritualisation of the self that is not purely limited to the regulation and control of verbal information or the body language of gestures, movements and tone of voice (Goffman 1969 [1959]). In informal gatherings, the separation between external and internal workers is also visible. Inside the building, there are specific places to have meals, coffee, cold drinks or tea. The spaces are intended to be shared by internal and external workers. They are, however, mostly occupied by external workers, as most operators and team leaders bring packed lunches to work since their wages do not enable them to have lunch outside the workplace. A part-​time operator doing the shift from 9.00 a.m. to 3.00 p.m. has no lunch break. The 30-​minute break he is entitled to per day is used as lunch time. Going from the call centre to the canteen takes about five minutes. As there are only three microwaves, there is usually a queue to heat food, which takes around ten minutes. This leaves the operator ten minutes to eat, given that he will need at least five minutes to return to the call centre. The vast majority of internal workers do not use the canteen, but instead frequent the restaurants and coffee shops available outside the building. The second reason for separation between external and internal workers is that people tend to ‘know their place’: ‘where they belong’ in public interaction and encounters.10 Smoking inside the building is not permitted. Workers gather near the entrance doors in front of the building to talk, smoke and take some fresh air during breaks. There aren’t usually mixed groups of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ workers. They are separated spatially and in the conviviality attached to shared space. Operators, ‘knowing their place’ in the informal structure of conviviality,

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turn this to their advantage. Smoking time, when not in the presence of a superior, constitutes moments of criticism, humour and the sharing of experiences in dealing with the ‘client’ that have proved successful in the past. The distinction between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ workers not only promotes a division among the workforce, it also presupposes another division, between ‘the client’ and ‘the call centre’, although this might seem to contradict the idea that the call centre is supposed to be geared to the ‘satisfaction of the client’. In other words, the most common critique made by operators regarding other departments of EVA is that they tend to regard the call centre as the ‘bastard son of the family’: it is perceived as being at the bottom of the hierarchy. This was manifested many times by operators when they said that their ‘work is not understood’ and that they do not have direct contact with other departments, or when qualifying their work as ‘trabalho de macaco’ (monkey work) as opposed to the more creative work performed by other departments. In the midst of exchanging emails regarding some process related to a client’s situation, it was common to hear operators and team leaders complaining that other departments tend to be less considerate when writing to ‘external’ workers. EVA takes advantage of this internal division because creating a barrier between the client and the company might ultimately be beneficial. I  shall illustrate this idea with a representative example. When I was shadowing operators and listening to calls, it was common for clients to ask if there was an information base to which they could go for advice rather than waiting online, complaining that it took them five minutes to talk to a person after being asked to make several choices either by pressing buttons in a menu of numbered options or by using voice commands.11 When operators are not sure where the retail outlets of the company are located, they ask the team leader for advice. When I asked why EVA does not have knowledge bases, the typical reply was that the company could save the costs it would have incurred by establishing them, and reduce costs further by externalising call centre services to TWAs. This means that operators face a double subordination. They are subordinated to the user firm (which is formally and informally designated as ‘the client’; legally speaking the user firm it is the client of the TWA), and to the client of the user firm, which is obscured as a higher entity to which subservience and deference should be shown. Conclusion The organisation of hiring, recruitment, training and job allocation in the call centre sector, built upon moral-​laden, nationally institutionalised employment conditions of uncertainty and powerlessness that characterise precarity, are crucial mechanisms through which workers as individuals, and their skills, are linguistically and practically envisioned as containers of subordination and agency. Young recruits are selected for their ability to show docility and to follow procedures in their work, but also for their potential ability to exercise judgement and make decisions according to what are considered ‘good practices’ in the overall functioning of the call centre.

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Workers are expected to show ‘investment’, ‘dedication’ and ‘professionalism’. The demand for ‘professionalism’ is a paradoxical request in the extreme, simultaneously asking for automatism while ‘showing a smile in your voice’. Young, compliant workers who seek self-​ improvement are expected to follow the procedures and learn how to act upon dysfunctional outcomes within the context of an internal hierarchical division that positions call centre workers at the bottom of the pyramid. The organisation of call centre work is pervaded by bureaucratic myths of standardisation, efficiency and regulation that are justified in the ‘name of the client’. For the operators, this fact, together with the division between internal and external workers, constitutes a source of humilation and double subordination, best described by the worker who termed his job monkey work. The ‘fear of answering the first call’ that I  described at the beginning of this chapter is an expression of an emotional and morally demanding form of learning that sums up the previous processes the worker had to go through after recruitment: training and learning ‘his place’ in the internal hierarchy of the call centre. The moral economy of labourer production in the Portuguese call centre sector is expressed in how recruits, and later operators, have to meet specific demands and requirements of behaviour, conduct and personality that draw upon the moral ambivalence between insecure and devalued employment conditions of precarity on one hand, and valued agentive capabilities on the other, such as foreign language skills, the ability to exercise judgement over unforeseen situations, emotional rapport, self-​control, decision-​making etc.).12 How workers are valued, evaluated and envisioned as containers of subordination and agency cuts across the various processes through which they pass, from the early stages of training up to full integration into the shop floor. This is particularly expressed in the contradictory demands made on operators to display normative feelings of friendliness (‘having a smile in your voice’) and comprehension, while at the same time suppressing negative emotions in order to meet qualitative targets of ‘customer satisfaction’. This theme is further analysed in the next chapter, where I address the manufacture of client sovereignty within call centres, how it shapes the nature of the operator–​client relationship and how it contributes to the overall specificity of call centre labour as a regime of disciplined agency. Notes 1 The user firm is the company in which the call centre is located, which I am calling EVA. User firm is the legal designation given to companies that contract services from temporary work agencies (TWAs). In this book, I do not provide a pseudonym for the TWA, which is why it is always referred by its abbreviation. EVA hires its call centre operators and team leaders through the TWA but directly hires its team and area coordinators. 2 This clarification session took place in January 2008. Since 1 January of the same year, the official minimum wage had been fixed at €426, meaning that the salary offered was below the official minimum wage. The TWA legally justified this wage difference as a lower payment for a form of ‘internal career progression’ for call centre operators. For the first year, the worker was considered an estagiário (intern), after which their passage

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to ‘junior’ status was recommended. This progression depended on the agreement of the user firm. Only after eighteen months as a junior was the possibility of becoming ‘senior’ discussed. It should be noted that this progression carried much more symbolic meaning than any real effects in terms of wages or social benefits. As mentioned earlier, in 2018 the official minimum wage was fixed at €580. According to the Portuguese Association of Contact Centres, the average monthly gross income of a call centre operator in 2018 was €769 (APCC 2019: 61). After taxes and social security deductions the net monthly income of a call centre operator would not be much higher than €550. In other words, for over a decade call centre operators’ wages have been consistently devalued. 3 Recruits signed a training contract that stipulated the payment of €1.45 per day of training. The contract also stipulated that if the recruit (and presumed future worker) decided to quit working at the call centre in the first year, they had to refund to the TWA the amount paid for the training week. 4 The temporal dimensions of work and the experience of dispossession are explored in Chapter 7. At this point, however, I would like to emphasise that the uncertainty and powerlessness associated with the precarious condition of employment are constantly deployed by management as a technique of labour control and as a form of discipline, which is a constant feature of everyday life at the call centre. In the last section of this chapter, I discuss one of the main forms through which this discipline is imposed: the division of the workforce into ‘internal’ and ‘external’ workers. This technique of control, intended to inculcate a particular disposition in workers, resembles what Pierre Bourdieu designated ‘flexploitation’: a mode of domination based on the creation of a generalised and permanent state of insecurity that forces workers into submission and acceptance of exploitation (Bourdieu 1998: 85). 5 Permission was not given to take pictures either inside or outside the building. 6 On commercial helplines, by contrast, there are a significant number of calls that do not involve any complaint. Clients may call to ask for information about specific products or services, or to request the activation or deactivation of a given service. 7 ‘Controlar a chamada’ is a common expression used by operators, and it is part of their ‘special mastery’. ‘Controlling the call’ means having the ability to deal with insults and humiliations. It means not letting the caller understand that although the operators may seem to act in a subservient manner towards them, the operator is nevertheless still in ‘control of the call’. 8 Linksys is the brand of a common router used to establish a wireless internet connection. 9 Drawing on empirical research conducted in the MacDonald’s hamburger restaurants and the sales force of Combined Insurance, Leidner (1993) shows that workers may mobilise work routinisation procedures in interactive service work as a way of protecting themselves from the indignities and insults experienced in their transactions with clients, and also to assert a greater control over the latter. 10 Pierre Bourdieu refers to the bodily knowledge acquired by social agents through practice and social interaction as leading to the internalisation of a ‘sense of one’s place’. This ‘sense of placement’ in relation to our present and potential position in a given space is physically expressed, for instance, in the ‘form of emotions (the unease of someone who is out of place, or the ease that comes from being in one’s place), and it is expressed in behaviours such as avoidance or unconscious adjustments such as the correction of one’s accent (in the presence of a person of higher rank) or, in situations of bilingualism, the choice of the language appropriate to the situation’ (Bourdieu 2000: 184). This ‘sense of one’s place’ can also be read as a form of symbolic violence to the extent that by abiding by it agents are reproducing the doxa –​unequal conditions of social existence

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perceived as natural, ‘taken for granted’ –​even if in the immediacy of practice social agents might interpret certain moments of resistance as gains (which I evoke later). 11 The technology that allows this latter operation is called ‘interactive voice response’ (IVR). The same name is used among workers at the call centre. 12 The ways in which the moral economy of labour production in the Portuguese call centre sector establishes a moral framework of work behaviour and best practice built upon the contradiction between subordination and agency resembles the analysis carried out for the Indian transnational call centre sector. Poster (2007) mentions how operators are required to carry out various forms of ‘national identity management’, embodying, thinking and acting as though they were American, which requires suppressing one’s cultural self, while also putting into effect improvisational and creative practices beyond the prescribed job requirements. Mirchandani (2012) refers to a dialectics of an economy of familiarity with an economy of difference to describe how call centre operators are valued for their ability to enact sameness as and difference from their customers in the USA. Similarly, Aneesh (2015:  8) suggests that the successful transmutation of cultural communication into global communication is dependent on workers’ skills in performing, enacting and reproducing two mutually constitutive processes:  neutralisation and mimesis. ‘[N]‌eutralization refers to attempts at paring down unwanted cultural particulars (e.g. accents) while mimesis refers to attempts at mimicking desirable cultural elements (e.g. politeness)’.

5

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Clients: operationalising consensus, internalising discipline

When the customer is king, unequal exchanges are normal, and from the beginning customer and client assume different rights to feeling and display. The ledger is supposedly evened by a wage. (Hochschild 1983: 86)

In this chapter I  elaborate on the idea of ‘the customer as king’, a construction congruent with a statement made to me by a call centre operator: ‘Without clients there would be no call centres.’ Within the sector, the client is the central entity in management discourse and practice, and is also the leitmotif by which work organisation and relations are defined. As implied in the previous chapter, the economic maintenance and viability of the call centre business demand the imposition of a certain kind of objective relationship between the operator and the client. In this chapter, I describe and examine how the imposition of this relationship is established, but I also point out the concomitant inefficiencies and contradictions taking place on the shop floor. My aim is to identify the role of the client as a figure of authority, shaping the form in which labour as service is mobilised within the sector.1 In call centres, the everyday emphaisis on the sovereignty of the client involves disciplining workers so that they may meet the requirements of creating ‘customer satisfaction’. To achieve this, workers are carefully indoctrinated as to what the client means and represents in the overall structure of the firm to which the call centre is attached, and how emotions towards the client should be managed and displayed (as I partly enunciated in the previous chapter, and explore further in Chapter 6). I begin by exploring how at EVA marketing operations and ritualised collective gatherings serve the purpose of manufacturing what I call the ‘transcendent client’. In the everyday life of the call centre, this entity becomes a cult object, particularly through management insistence on the importance of ‘teamwork’ and ‘team values’. In the remaining sections of the chapter, I concentrate on exploring how the client is represented on the shop floor among operators, team leaders and management. I examine how operators narrate their telephone encounters with clients, and how they experience and explain clients’ demeaning commentaries, verbal

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expressions of relational superiority and emotional assaults. Operators envision clients as the main source of exploitation because the structural, organisational power asymmetry between operator and client is experienced through their generation’s broader moral sentiments of unequal entitlement, subordination, and lack of recognition and status. The morally embedded nature of the interactions between operators and clients mediates the conditions in which the ideology of the ‘transcendent client’ comes to be accommodated or challenged by operators. I  conclude the chapter by examining how, on the shop floor, the management’s deification of the ‘transcendent client’ becomes the target of mockery. Operators and team leaders, in particular, engage in various ways in making the client look stupid. Through gossip, humour and rumours the figure of the ‘transcendent client’, to whom deference and subservience must be shown at all times, is contested. Such temporary subversion has one important unintended consequence, however, which is to reinforce an ‘operational consensus’ (Goffman 1969 [1959]: 9) vis-​à-​ vis the role of the client in the call centre regime –​a regime of disciplined agency. Manufacturing the ‘transcendent client’: ‘we need to take good care of our clients’ In the previous chapter, I  described how the programmes of recruitment and training people for work in a call centre make ‘orientation towards the client’ the central imperative. This imperative is not specific to the call centre sector and is found in several other types of business. It flowed logically from the historical advent of mass consumption in capitalist societies and the ideological constitution of the ‘consumer society’, which depended not only on the large-​scale manufacture of goods but also on the ‘manufacture of customers’ (Ewen 2001 [1976]: 187). Throughout the twentieth century the emergence and expansion of the ideology of the sovereign customer in capitalist societies was linked to various interrelated factors, including the spread of the ideology of the enterprise or the rising hegemony of the neo-​classical economic consumer, driven by the hedonistic behavioural principles of autonomy, freedom and choice (Gay and Salaman 1992; Miller 1995).2 My goal in this section is to bring out how the ‘transcendent client’ is manufactured within the call centre sector through marketing operations and other kinds of ritualistic gatherings. Marketing operations epitomise the most important elements in the making of the ‘transcendent client’: the importance of deference (or what might be called the cult of the client), the normative effects of ritual and the enactment of the belief in the ‘group spirit’. The marketing operation I  will consider consisted of a day-​ long special training session that all workers had to attend, and that took place in one of the most important cultural meeting centres in Lisbon. I  arrived with the workers from the contact unit I had been following since the beginning of my fieldwork and followed them to the registration desk of the conference. Each one of us had to state their name, function and employer, and collect a badge. On registration we were further informed that on the upper floor coffee and refreshments were

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available before the beginning of the conference, offered by the principal director of customer service support. We began to move to the floor where coffee was being served, while trying to identify who was present, who was absent and forming groups, the workers making small talk and joking that they were getting a free lunch plus a day off work. Despite the jokes, movements were governed by formality, and the groups replicated the internal hierarchy of the company itself. This is an event that takes place every year and is typical of the kind of instruction and indoctrination of workers administered by the company. The conference began shortly afterwards in a big auditorium. A  member of the marketing department explained the activities of the day and that the workers were going to be divided into several groups that would each be allocated to a member of the training team in the afternoon. She then asked for applause for the training team and presented the principal director –​for whom applause was also invited –​who would address the workers on the main reasons why the company was pursuing some changes in its philosophy of relating to clients. The director began his address by stating that he was going to talk about two different subjects: the overall position of the company in the telecommunications sector, and the main slogan heading this marketing operation. After this, he asked for a round of applause for all the workers who ‘are in contact every day with our clients and are getting closer to them every day’: the operators. He then presented the main idea behind this marketing operation, which was going to ‘change the face of the company’: that ‘all the companies know how to recruit clients but not all of them know how to take care of the clients’. He insisted that ‘we need to take good care of our clients’. The company was now going to enter a new cycle in which instead of being focused on itself it would redirect its attention ‘towards the client’. The main slogan was ‘Nós somos diferentes com os nossos clientes’, meaning ‘We treat our clients differently’ (literally ‘We are different with our clients’). He added that all through his life his main inspiration had been the Toyota company, which had, in his own words, ‘changed the direction of attention from the company’s internal processes to the client’s desires’.3 The director had communicated his marketing strategy by the systematic repetition of its key symbolic word: ‘client’. He presented it as a general philosophy: ‘We treat our clients differently’ –​ a philosophy that would be enacted in a meta-​ organisation replacing the limited business of telecommunications (the company itself). The enactment of such a belief would be carried out by the operators. After several repetitions, some humour and lots of invited applause, the presentation ended. Each of us donned the badges we had been given. The badges came in three different colours with three different slogans: ‘innovate’, ‘improve’ and ‘make real’, which told us which room to go to. With my ‘make real’ badge, I  made my way to the appropriate room, where the trainer had already begun the session with a PowerPoint presentation featuring a three-​dimensional picture of a butterfly. She asked the audience what they saw in the picture. Some said a butterfly, others a painting with the shape of a butterfly. She then asked if everyone was already acquainted with the ‘butterfly effect’. Some said they knew the main idea: the movement of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil could set off a tornado in Texas.

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The trainer’s purpose with this butterfly metaphor was to emphasise that the individual attitude of each worker in the company could have significant consequences for the global service provided to the client. Each worker, she said, should invest attention and detail in their work in order to effect the changes that were going to take place in the procedures for dealing with clients’ complaints. There were going to be two main differences: (1) the way the complaint was going to be categorised in the computer program devoted to this purpose, and (2) the way the information was going to be transmitted to the client concerning the ‘average time of resolution’ of each problem. Previously, operators had only categorised this sort of call under the heading ‘complaint’ in situations where the client was explicitly complaining about a certain service, operation or product.4 The new procedure ruled that every call in which the client was implicitly as well as explicitly complaining should be classed as a complaint. The following example was given: ‘If a client calls the line saying that he was not able to make calls during the morning and he asks if there is a general problem with the lines, how do you categorise this call?’. Everyone answered that the call should be categorised as ‘information’ because the client was not ‘nervous’ or ‘screaming’. From now on these calls should be registered as complaints. Those needing follow-​up would be directed to another department. There were also going to be changes in the information that call centre operators should give clients on the ‘average time resolution’ for the problem reported. In the new model, the complaints program would give the ‘average time resolution’, which they should report to the client. The maximum ‘average time resolution’ for any problem would be stipulated as four days. According to a representative of one of the TWAs subcontracted by EVA, ‘This change is important because it allows the operator to diagnose the client’s complaints by the causes and not the effects. The company, because it has a strategy of improving the quality of the service rendered to the client, is now focused on analysing the causes that lead so many clients to complain about their services.’ After the morning session, lunch was served to the participants. Groups were divided according to the ‘contact unit’ (i.e. call centre) to which they belonged and their ranking in the internal hierarchy of the company. Temporary workers and permanent workers were not visibly separated, however, given the extensive profusion of symbols and slogans that appealed to the idea of ‘collective endeavour’. Inside the rooms, in the outside spaces where smoking was allowed, on the badges that we all had to wear, the slogan that resonated was ‘new beginning’: ‘We are certain that with your contribution to this Mission, in the Team we are truly going to make a difference in customer service.’ The marketing operation described is partly replicated in other workers’ gatherings organised by the company. For instance, at Christmas there is usually a dinner organised for staff (both permanent and temporary) in which the main symbols used (such as badges, posters with slogans alluding to ‘collective endeavour’, or games and group activities that stress the importance of the ‘group spirit’) are the same, and the same rhetorical acclaim for the sovereignty of the client

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is enacted. These gatherings are to a great extent ritualised, and aim to reinforce an ideology in which the client is the main ‘transcendent entity’. The figure of the client as transcendental entity becomes a source and medium of authority, affecting both processes of work but also relations between fellow workers and management. In what follows I concentrate on describing and analysing how the belief in the ‘transcendent client’ is enacted on the call shop floor.

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The cult of the client and ‘working for the team’ Every telecommunications company has a marketing department, which together with the human resources department elaborates, develops and implements a specific strategy of managing the client through a relationship. In modern terminology this is called ‘customer relationship management’. It entails establishing procedures for the interaction between the company and the client, monitoring the operations and evaluating the results. In this section, I discuss how call centres (which are designated as part of the ‘customer service and support department’) are required to use a specific set of rhetorical devices and rituals in order to enact the philosophy of the ‘sovereign client’. When I began my fieldwork at EVA’s call centre, operators and team leaders frequently referred to the marketing department as primarily responsible for the elaboration of the procedures workers had to follow. It produced a set of prescriptions that constituted the general orientation of the company towards the clients. These rules were posted on the intranet to remind workers of the company’s aims. The company’s description of each of these items is as follows: Vision To become the telecommunications operator with the highest rate of recommendation from the clients. Mission To represent each client and be effective in the resolution of clients’ questions. Values Commitment: I accomplish my deadlines/​I see the resolution of all questions through to completion. Attention: I listen/​I interpret/​I adapt my action to the client. Respect: I treat the client with dignity, respect and politeness/​I treat every client as my most important. Empathy: I build a relationship of trust with the client.

The full exposition of the company’s aims was expressed in the following paragraph on its intranet:

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Each contact with one of our clients is unique, and one in which the quality of our customer service and our capacity to answer are put to the test. It is in these moments that we should build a relationship of trust with our clients. By investing in learning and continuous improvement, our teams who take care of the client are our guide in the orientation of EVA towards the client, transforming [that client orientation] into a solid and unbeatable advantage.

Adherence to and compliance with this mission is measured by indicators, which I  discuss more extensively in the next chapter, such as the rate of good service.5 This list of rules governing relations with the client not only shapes the daily work of operators but also locates ‘the client’ at the epicentre of a rhetoric characterising itself as a form of ‘metaphysics of customer service’ intended to transcend the individual worker. That is, the ‘values’ described in the box should be followed individually, but they are only ratified through collective enterprise. The mythologisation necessary to develop this belief in the mission is the emphasis on the assertion that this can only be achieved collectively: each person must adhere to the ‘group spirit’ and ‘work for the team’. Operators are commonly divided into teams of around eight or ten, each with a team leader. The expressions ‘working for the team’ and ‘team values’ are ritualised because they allow organisations to substitute loyalty to the organisation with loyalty and fidelity to the ‘team’, with significant consequences in the relationships between fellow workers and management. ‘Working for the team’ comes up like a slogan in everyday conversations at the call centre, in break-​time conversation as well as in email exchanges between workers and management about tasks and work conduct. Management repeatedly uses the expression ‘working for the team’ and ‘team values’ to create the illusion that through the team a highly individualised work process becomes collectivised. Management’s efforts to secure operators’ compliance in the ‘team’ obfuscates the objective contractual division of the workforce between temporary and permanent staff. When operators work for the ‘sake of the team’, it is as if they are part of a system of mutually dependent professional categories working towards a common goal. For the user firm, investing in training sessions where the ‘team values’ are glorified is a means of achieving control over the work process through the intensification of normative peer-​pressure among coworkers (Van den Broek et al. 2004). By emphasising the importance of teamwork, management can maintain a high degree of control over the labour process (normalising and disciplining work behaviours), while at the same time extending control over interpersonal relationships operating at the level of many call centre sector transactions. This was most pronounced in an episode involving a new operator. Pedro had no previous experience of call centre work and was beginning a university degree. When he started work as an operator, he was informed at a ‘behaviour training session’ that operators are obliged to ask permission from team leaders every time they want to leave their work station to go to the toilet, take a break or go to lunch. Pedro found this rule too intrusive and protested to the team coordinator that this kind of obligation should be stipulated in his employment contract. He insisted that he would only follow this rule if he were handed a written document stipulating it

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from the TWA. The day after this incident Pedro was no longer working at the call centre; an operator remarked ‘Pedro was not following the rules of the team.’ All operators, team leaders and management maintained that such strict control was exercised over the operators ‘for the sake of the team’ and in order for the team to improve their ‘service level’ in terms, for instance, of the number of calls answered per day.6 Any behaviour that places the ‘team’ at risk, such as Pedro’s demand, is criticised by both fellow workers and management as not abiding by the team’s values. What this episode demonstrates is the extent to which workers internalise the rhetoric of ‘working for the team’ and how management uses the team as a way to exert control over relations among workers and their behaviour. For management the team is an instrument for the daily execution of the main aim of the company, as we saw earlier: ‘our teams who take care of the client are our guide in the orientation of EVA towards the client’. Challenging the transcendent client, internalising discipline The training session I  have described, in which I  addressed how the client is manufactured as a transcendent entity to be served and cared for, is partly questioned on the shop floor by both operators and management. Within the sector contestation takes the form of a ritualised representation of the ‘stupid client’. This mockery is commonly expressed in humour and parallel conversation between calls. Management does not tacitly condone these conversations, or jokes in the workplace. For operators, engaging in rituals through which the client is made to look stupid means being able to negate and contradict what they consider to be the primary source of exploitation. For management, allowing the freedom for these rituals to take place means securing control not only over the rules of activity and interpersonal relationships but also over the conditions where these activities take place. In other words, the several ways the client is challenged and derided are also the means by which operators internalise self-​discipline in their performance towards that client. Before outlining the various discursive devices by which operators and management enlist the topos of the ‘stupid client’, I will explore the most prominent aspects highlighted by operators when talking about callers. They relate how they are made to feel inferior by clients, often connecting this experience of subordination with the despotic, arbitrary and paternalistic dominant model of authority underpinning the long years of the dictatorship.7 They express a deep resentment at how clients make them feel unworthy, withholding respect and professional recognition, and allude to how most clients do not understand call centre work practices. Operators experience a lack of status as citizens and workers when clients justify their entitlement to constant attention and subservience because ‘I am the one paying your wages.’ Finally, they feel dispossessed of their knowledge, skills, and educational and cultural capital when clients imply or convey that they are the human version of the IVR. The way operators narrate their transactions with clients reveals how service work interactions are experienced and perceived

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as shaped by the rules of organisational work performance and as socially and morally embedded relationships. Operators envision the figure of the transcendent client promoted by management as a source of exploitation because of its embeddedness in a broader structure of the sense of material and moral dispossession felt by their generation as a whole, lived as a disconnection between experience and expectation: the experience of joining a socially devalued service labour sector and having to adopt and enact a subordinate and subservient working persona in transactions with clients, as opposed to expectations of being incorporated into socially valued white-​collar service work, aligned with their educational credentials and shaped by the values of freedom, autonomy and independence. The disconnect between experience and expectation forces call centre workers to navigate conditions of moral ambiguity in their struggle to define the meaning of their everyday work experience and the acceptable or non-​acceptable claims made by clients about the products of their (emotional) labour (Scott 1977: 3–​4). With the following descriptions, I  do not wish to portray operators either as puppets in a structure that encompasses them (reification), or as individuals capable of regaining control over the labour process through discursive devices (voluntarism). ‘Beyond accommodation and resistance’ (Calagione, Francis and Nugent 1992) I aim to illustrate how the intersection of the ideological prescription of the client’s sovereignty and a particular moral economy of generational expectations, claims and entitlements generates constraints and opportunities in how call centre operators struggle to define the performative aspects of their work. By performative aspects, I mean how they justify certain attitudes and discourses on the part of the client, how they collectively define them as real, how they justify their effects, and how they establish the best form to cope with them in the immediacy of working. Operators talk about the clients The functions of the operators who provide technical support to corporate clients shape the transactions between them, as well as the terms in which operators talk about clients. The contact unit that I followed during my fieldwork had specific functions in terms of client support: • to screen for difficulties in voice services, Broadband, VoIP, fax, e-​services, domains and web hosting; • to verify the services’ activation status provided by the company (voice, broadband and VoIP); • to provide help in the configuration of broadband equipment; • to provide assistance to outsourced partners who are selling products to clients; • to ship broadband equipment; • to log information and complaints tickets on the appropriate software application; • to despatch broadband activation documents; • to ensure commercial support to clients between 12 a.m. and 8 p.m.

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As previously mentioned, a technical support helpline has a very high level of complaints. Ninety per cent of calls are to report a problem with one of the services supplied by the company. The high number of ‘angry clients’ is one of the reasons why operators providing technical support are exposed to a much greater degree of emotional distress in the case of commercial helplines. Furthermore, the activities related to remote configuration of services are felt to be particularly difficult and demanding when carried out by phone. They require the operator to ‘imagine what is happening on the other end of the line’ while at the same time articulating the necessary steps for any of the applications supported. Operators often said that the insults and abuse were the hardest aspects of the job. The rudeness of clients strongly coloured the language operators used to describe, interpret and defy them. A  typical description was:  ‘Clients are rude, offensive and arrogant; they do not show any recognition of the work of a call centre operator.’ Workers have to manage daily insults from the clients according to the prescriptions for emotional performance they are obliged to follow. Hence they always refer to this central experience as a ‘lack of recognition’ of their work. One operator commented on her feelings of being diminished by clients, linking it to how the latter characterise call centre work as a socially devalued and deprecated form of work: They [the clients] treat me as if I was someone who does not know how to do anything. There was one client who told me ‘you young women, you are working there because you don’t know how to do anything else’ … I  have met people here in the call centre who have started crying because people insulted them over the phone.

Another employee stressed how operators are ‘treated as a group of ignorant children’, making another direct link with the repressive forms of paternalistic authoritarianism underpinning the times of the dictatorship: I think that Salazar is not here anymore; Salazar is dead, and I think it’s time to begin treating people like people. Do not treat call centre operators as objects; do not treat them as kids who are working just for the sake of some extra money, or to pay for college. Working in a call centre should be a profession; there are countries where that happens … because the idea that people have of call centres is that we are all a bunch of kids –​students mostly –​who only want some pin-​ money to buy a pair of jeans or go clubbing! So many times, clients have said to me things like ‘I know you are all a bunch of kids’, or ‘I know you are all kids; you don’t even belong to the company.’ One client once told me ‘you are a group of ignorant kids …’. So many times I heard that, so many times.

Another worker said that the clients’ lack of respect led them to level direct insults at the operators: They don’t respect us; if they did I would not have had to hear what I have heard so far. People calling me names … I am not the one who cancels their services; it’s not my fault. This morning one of the first clients [whose call] I answered started

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Disciplined agency screaming, saying that we had cancelled his broadband service, and all the time I was trying to explain to him that the service was not cancelled. The reason why he had no internet service was that the configuration had not been done yet. In order not to be rude to the client I had to hang up on the call. Then I had to say some words out loud to relax a bit.

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Another operator, however, made the distinction between clients who are angry because they are entitled to be and those who attack the worker personally: I remember a client, not very long ago –​a very nice client for whom I did everything I could to solve her problem in the shortest period possible. After less than three hours I was able to solve the problem and I called her back to tell her. And then she started complaining that it had taken me a very long time to solve the problem, and she kept on complaining and saying that she would like to make a formal complaint against me. Every operator in these circumstances starts to think ‘I did all that I could to help the client and this is what I get in return?’. Clients don’t understand the number of tasks that we have to do in order to be able to solve the problem; they don’t have the slightest idea of what is behind the line. They don’t have any idea. When I call other companies –​because I am also a client –​I have a different sensibility when talking to the operator because I know they are not the one to blame for the company’s problems. I make a complaint if I  have to, but I  am not going to start screaming at the person who is listening to me because it is not her fault. There is no need to be rude or offensive … But operators also have different ways of dealing with complaints. In my case, for instance, if a client begins to be offensive, I warn once, then twice, and the third time they do it I end the call. Then you have clients who speak drivel. They are impolite, but they are not attacking me, they are attacking the company, and at the end of the call they even say ‘I am sorry Mr X, I know it’s not your fault but you are the only one I can talk to.’ In that kind of situation we exercise patience, and sometimes we know that clients have reasons to be upset. But when a client comes on the line screaming at me and attacking me personally, which has happened several times, then I end the call, and I don’t give them a chance.

This operator’s testimony reveals the extent to which workers internalise the ‘social engineering of emotions’ (Hochschild 1983). In this case, the worker draws a sharp distinction between what is expected from his functions as a call centre operator –​which is why he recognises that sometimes the ‘client is right’ –​and what he considers to be personal attacks. The distinction between insults that ‘come with the job’ and personal insults is a consequence of the efforts of every individual –​client or worker –​to correct this ‘social engineering of feeling’ and to protect themselves against the force of commerce by preserving a ‘real self ’ inaccessible to commodification (Hochschild 1983: 34). Such a distinction, however, is also a derivative of a moral working definition of exploitation that both affirms and denies the emotional service that clients demand. Operators often told me in conversations and interviews that they felt proud when able to help a client solve a problem. More than once I observed the investment made by operators in trying to do so, even when they were deliberately putting their quantitative

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evaluation at risk (which can easily happen if the operator has a call that lasts for more than forty minutes). Even in situations that ‘work against them’ operators try to regain a sense of recognition (by ‘doing a good job’) that is sometimes lost in the midst of abuse, insults and harshness. Operators invest in doing a good job, with the aim of regaining (even if only momentarily) a sense of meaning in what they do, sometimes by partaking in the organisation’s demand that they show and enact a ‘professional’ working persona, thereby accepting the function of bearing the insults that ‘come with the job’ and denying those deemed to be unacceptable –​ personal insults.8 The second most frequent comment regarding clients was that ‘they don’t understand how the work is done inside the call centre’. This is the main discursive starting point on which operators elaborate further in describing the pervasive arrogance and disrespectful comments of clients vis-​à-​vis the nature of the operator’s work. One employee described clients’ lack of comprehension as follows: There were clients who turned to me and said ‘look, I want you to give me the username and passwords by phone’, to which I replied ‘I am very sorry sir but I am not authorised to give this information by phone’, and the client said ‘look, I am the one who is paying your wage, so you have to do what I am telling you to do’ [silence]. And then I usually reply ‘I am sorry to say this but you are not the one who is paying my wage. I have to abide by certain procedures, and if I don’t follow them I am putting my job in danger.’ They are very arrogant with us … And there are lots of clients like this one. [I ask him why clients are so disrespectful to operators.] What happens is that it is not the operator’s fault. For instance, that client I told you about, he had the broadband service already active for one week but he hadn’t yet received the documentation with the username and passwords. We had already asked for this documentation to be sent to the client. And there was nothing else we could do. And the client was very upset … No, clients don’t respect what we do, and then they think that the operator is not bothered with what is happening to them. And partly this is true. In the beginning, I used to worry a lot about clients’ problems, about what they were feeling, but now … I still worry, but not as I used to.

Another operator emphasised this ignorance of how work is conducted, demonstrated by a client’s not understanding the lack of autonomy operators endure: I don’t think clients understand how a call centre works. OK, they understand that there is someone on the other end of the line who is registering what they say, but they don’t know how this works. We do answer the calls but we are not solving the problems by ourselves. We are not the ones who will go to check the status of the landline cable. We answer the call, we speak to the client, we try to solve the problem on the line, but if we are not able to solve it we have to create a ‘ticket’ for the complaint and send it to another department. That other department will do remote tests. If that does not work, someone else will have to go to check the client’s installation to see what is happening. But I don’t think clients understand

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Disciplined agency this … The majority of the clients think that they will call us and everything will be solved.

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Another worker summed up his opinion on clients’ failure to understand the internal dynamics of the call centre with the metaphor of the human IVR: Clients don’t understand how work is done inside the call centre. They don’t have any idea. The majority of the clients think that we write something on a piece of paper and then we run to the central installations to connect whatever is missing, and then run back to the call centre to talk to them! They think that by being a technical support helpline we behave like the technicians who go to the places and fix something, but we don’t. We only register information … we are a kind of human IVR, let’s put it like that.

For operators, clients’ lack of knowledge and understanding, expressed as arrogant, disrespectful and demeaning comments, is a manifestation of a publicly sanctioned distorted view of the working conditions and contradictory requirements made of call centre operators. These contradictions are clearly illustrated by the way that internalising and deploying a self-​disciplined performance as a ‘kind of human IVR’ in order to manage the emotional burden arising from clients’ incomprehension and demeaning comments may be in tension with the moral investment operators make in their work and with the kind of work behaviours that management seeks to extract from them: ‘to care for the client’ or ‘to imagine what is happening on the other end of the line’. This implies the duty to act as one operator does: ‘I try to feel what the client is feeling.’ This was vividly described by someone explaining to me why clients did not understand how a call centre functions. No, I don’t think clients understand what we do; they don’t have any idea; they don’t know. I didn’t know either, and I was always inside the world of technology. Nowadays, when I phone a call centre, I know perfectly well how I am going to talk to that person. I even help her if I can. Because I know that, contrary to what many people think, it is a tough job … People think that we are seated in front of our screens and that’s it. But it’s not like that. In face-​to-​face work we have someone in front of us; we can try to explain with our faces, with our gestures, the way we talk –​we can try to calm the client down like that. People feel they are being taken care of. In a telephone service [a client doesn’t] feel that kind of support and then [he gets] upset. And then we have to show with our voices that we are taking care of his problem, we have to ‘spoil him’, we have to make him feel that we are supporting him, do you understand? We have to assure him that we are doing all we can to solve the situation. And that is sometimes not as easy as it looks, because we may not be in the mood to do that, given what the client has said to us. So we have to neutralise all the bad things that we have heard from the client and try to … and sometimes that annoys me very much because I put myself in the client’s shoes, and I try to think what the client’s options are. I try to feel what the client is feeling and that is not easy. Of course, that depends on the personality of each of us … In my case I am always very stressed because I tend to put myself into the client’s shoes. And I absorb a bit of his stress too.

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The cause of the distress expressed by this operator is the client –​a view widely shared among operators. From this follows the most cynical appreciation of clients:  ‘clients are stupid’. Operators are obliged to put on a show of deference towards the clients, during which they are not entitled to ‘the ordinary luxury of negative reciprocity’ (Scott 1990: 23); if they did respond negatively, they would risk losing their job. The ‘hidden transcript’ shared among operators, which ritually portrays the client as stupid, incapable and even silly, suspends temporarily the disciplined conduct demanded by management in order to provide ‘customer satisfaction’. One operator illustrated this as he explained why clients do not even try to read the instruction manual before calling the call centre: Sometimes we answer this kind of client in their late forties; they are not used to certain kinds of services, they have no cultural background in these kinds of services, and then I think they think ‘OK, so this is not working and it should be working’, and they don’t know why, and they don’t care to know why, so they call us! User’s manual –​what is that?! The router, that little box over there –​what is it?! Of course, we are a technical support helpline so we are going to ask about that ‘little box’. And they say ‘I don’t have the internet’, and I ask ‘OK, do you have your modem connected?’, and they answer ‘Modem –​what is that?’, and then we say ‘Look, is there a cable coming out of your computer? Just follow the cable.’ In these situations we have to be a bit … we have to try to explain to the client, and if he understands maybe he will not call another time asking for the same thing. But of course in these cases the first contact will not be eight minutes; it will have to be at least thirty minutes … Of course, that will depend on our mood, on our mood for instructing clients!

As this worker shows, viewing clients as incapable of understanding and managing modern computer functions also pushes the worker into the deployment of creative pedagogical techniques, which is why ultimately management allows for the continuous ‘stupid client’ topos. Such a ritualistic device also allows space for criticism at the same time that it contributes to a form of ‘operational consensus’ (Goffman 1969 [1959]:  9) regarding the modes in which the triangular relationship among workers, management and clients is expressed in the ‘public transcript’. The ‘stupid client’: gossip, humour and rumours On the shop floor, this cynical view of the client is disseminated and maintained through three main techniques:  gossip, humour and rumour. Although these techniques aim at reproducing the stereotype of the ‘stupid client’ –​‘the one who cannot find the start menu on his computer’ –​they may also be used against other targets. These include the permanent staff of the user company, especially high-​ ranking directors, or workers from other technical departments carrying out managerial tasks –​such as the training session described at the beginning of this chapter.

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The one-​day training session described earlier was also the platform for gossip and criticism among the trainees. This was most pronounced during the lunch break. People were distributed around several tables according to their professional ranking inside the firm. Among operators, the majority of the comments concerned the food that was being served, how it was being served and the amount that was being served. They gossiped extensively about the fact that management was usually ‘very stingy’ when it came to providing a good meal for the workers. They also criticised some other temporary workers (especially the trainers) who were seated next to management, saying that they were ‘practising flattery’ in order to move up inside the company. This illustrates how gossip is a powerful resource not only as a form of disguised criticism but also as a way of asserting moral boundaries concerning the acceptable form of behaviour within a given group, without resorting to direct confrontation (Gluckman 1963). The use of gossip shaped every monthly team meeting I attended. The most recurrent humorous observations were made regarding working conditions. Team leaders would joke about their low wages by stating ironically that they had finally reached the top of their careers and were earning €700 per month. However, the most frequent subject of gossip was the launch of new services or products. Every week operators from all contact units had to attend a training session. Usually, the session was devoted to the presentation of new products and services, something that did not generally interest the technical operators as it was not their job to inform clients about services and products. From their point of view this made the weekly training session a ‘waste of time’. Nevertheless, given that they had to attend (the user firm is legally obliged to provide a specific number of training hours per month to its ‘collaborators’) they had to abide by this ritual. Every week during my fieldwork call operators repeated ‘The training was useless.’ Every week they pointed out that the information on new products and services was useless because it was being delivered too late. The vast majority of the operators had already got to know about new products from the clients themselves. Each week there is widespread gossip about this aspect of the training session. Operators speculate on the same topic with some superficial variants, and they all lead to the same conclusion: management is incompetent, inefficient and poorly organised. Gossip as a form of criticism is extensively used among both operators and team leaders. This usually takes place during breaks or in emails. Events or gatherings organised by the TWA or the user firm are discussed afterwards to the point of exhaustion. Such gossip achieves the same goal: creating a temporary alliance among the temporary workers in opposition to management. What the three modes –​gossip, jokes and rumour –​have in common is that they simultaneously express a moral evaluation of working conditions, provide a way of propagating and controlling information, and contribute to the ‘operational consensus’. As we have seen, humour is primarily directed at the clients. There are several ways of making the client the running topic of humour on shop floor. In the gaps between calls, operators chat with each other, especially when the team leaders or area coordinators are not present. The mute button allows for a running

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commentary such as ‘Why can’t he [the client] understand?’, or ‘Can you believe that this guy asked me if I can send him the drives for software x by fax?!’, or ‘Just press the button, you big animal!’. One consequence of the extensive use of this behaviour is that management began replacing the telephones with ones without a mute button. In emails, breaks and social gatherings organised by the workers outside work, the client is systematically targeted. Emails circulate among operators containing jokes, cartoons and videos downloaded from the web that portray the client as stupid and ignorant. At one point during my fieldwork, a plan was circulated by email about the possibility of compiling the funniest conversations with clients. One of the jokes repeated to me more than once, the original provenance of which no-​one knows, concerned a client who called to ask assistance on the configuration of internet services. At one point the operator asked the client to close any dialogue boxes that were open. In Portuguese, the word for dialogue boxes is janelas: literally ‘windows’. According to the story, the operator then heard the noise of the windows being closed. After a short while, the client returned to the line and asked, ‘OK, I have closed all the windows in the house, what shall I do now?’. Of course, the fact that no-​one could assure me that this situation had indeed occurred did not matter. Besides the truth or falsehood of this anecdote, the point was to repeat the story. One common rumour concerning call centre work consists of stories about clients who were able to gain entry to a call centre. There is an immense collection of stories, and again no-​one knows whether or not they are true, and no-​one knows who first told the story. One afternoon, while I was smoking a cigarette with a group of operators in front of the building, another operator approached us and asked: ‘Did you hear about the client?’. Everyone was curious. He said someone had told him that a client had managed to get inside the call centre. We all went back into the building to ask if anyone knew what had happened. An eyewitness told us that a client had been able to get inside through the door connected to the garage because he had been a company employee and still had an entry card for the garage. Once he was inside, he asked the eyewitness ‘Which one of these contact units is the technical support?’. The worker replied ‘It’s here –​are you an assistant?’, to which the client replied ‘No, I’m a client.’ ‘Client … what do you mean?’ ‘I am a client.’ ‘Can you please wait a second? I will call the coordinator.’ The employee went to the team coordinator of the technical support unit and explained what was happening. The coordinator asked the client to follow him into a meeting room, where they stayed for about an hour. Later I found out that what had compelled the client to go to the call centre was the fact that it had not yet processed the change of address he had asked for. The operator who had been present during the entire incident finished his story laughing, and saying ‘Look, when he said that he was a client I was scared! It was like I was seeing the devil!’. There are also rumours concerning clients who manage to discover which operator they

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spoke to on the phone, track down the location of the call centre and then –​so goes the story –​threaten the employee in front of the company buildings. Within closed workplaces such as call centres, where workers spend many hours in the same physical position subjected to a high degree of emotional distress, humour is permitted to a certain extent by management. One of the reasons for this is that the social effects of such humour do not jeopardise what is required of the workers; instead, they are a source of relief and transference. It is preferable for the worker to tell his colleague that clients are stupid rather than tell the clients themselves. Hence, humour and ritual joking make it possible to maintain the conditions in which work is carried out –​operational consensus –​and in which the client remains a ‘transcendent entity’ to be served and cared for. Conclusion My aim in this chapter has been to discuss the extent to which the ideology of what I call the ‘transcendent client’ affects the way labour as service is mobilised within the call centre sector. This emphasis on the client as a means of analysing and defining work processes and work relations is central within the call centre labour process. I  have demonstrated this by providing evidence of the way marketing strategies within the firm manufacture the ‘transcendent client’. Through symbolic production, rituals and the enactment of ‘team spirit’, firms transform their key goal of client satisfaction into a normative model of work performance. The terms in which operators portray clients and the way they describe their experiences in dealing with them reveal the extent to which those serving them have to bear direct insults and aggressive verbal assaults. More importantly, they reveal how interactions between operators and clients are not only governed by organisational prescriptions but are also embedded in moral sentiments of disentitlement characteristic of the workers’ generation, which mediate how and to what extent such an emotionally charged form of labour is both internalised and contested by operators. The extent to which ‘serving the client’ is internalised is revealed, for instance, in the separation one operator made between what he considered to be ‘insults that come with the job’ and ‘personal insults’. However, internalisation coexists with contestation. Such contestation is to a certain degree allowed by management, which means that it takes place on the public stage. I have explored how vital gossip, jokes and rumour are to both workers and management as ways of expressing criticism, disseminating information and maintaining the ‘operational consensus’. Such behaviours are an effective means for operators to engage in criticism and challenge the status quo, as long as they ‘secure a laugh’ within the boredom and routine of everyday life at work. The unintended consequences of the operator’s compliance are that a set of regulations concerning what they do, and how and why they do it, remain unquestioned. Thus, the reverse side of the ‘stupid client’ is the internalisation of a set of self-​ disciplinary techniques that shape the transactions between clients and operators, and that are highly beneficial for management. Managers want staff to ‘serve’ the client, show deference, give the client instructions and perform tasks of the

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imagination such as visualising ‘what is happening at the other end of the line’. For operators, adherence to these prescriptions always entails a dilemma: be a robot or be a creative thinker. In the next chapter, I  explore this theme further by discussing the ways the sector attempts to solve this dilemma through the extensive use of auditing techniques such as ‘benchmarking’. I also detail how these activities are practised on the shop floor by resorting to quantification and surveillance as essential tools in imposing accountability and discipline on workers. Following this, I  clarify what I mean by my recurrent expression regime of disciplined agency, which was first advanced in the introduction and concerning which the present chapter still only tells part of the story. Notes 1 The role and functions of the customer or client as a device of control and source of authority in service work have constituted a relatively neglected theme in the service labour literature (Korczynski 2009; Lopez 2010). In her early study of emotional labour among flight attendants, Hochschild (1983) emphasised the prominent alienating features of the ‘customer as king’ formula in the way workers were required to engage in a ‘transmutation’ (i.e. alienation) of their feelings and selves to create the desirable state of mind in the client. Since Hochschild’s pioneering study, more nuanced elaborations on the figure of the client have emerged. Paules’s (1991) ethnography of waitressing in a New Jersey restaurant, inspired by Scott’s (1985) notion of ‘everyday forms of resistance’, shows how waitresses devise ‘strategies of action’, with the aim of subverting the symbolism of service work, that contradict customer-​backed metaphors of waitressing as a form of nineteenth-​century domestic servitude. The work of Paules paved the way for an important research tendency to emerge when addressing the triangular service relationship (management–​worker–​client). In the ethnographic record, this important tendency has increasingly pushed researchers to address the service encounter as not only the outcome of organisational prescriptions, but also a cultural and moral relationship embedded in hierarchies of class, status and race external to the labour process, which structure the distribution of entitlement and disentitlement among workers and clients (Sherman 2007; Hanser 2012). For a similar approach in the call centre literature see, for instance, Bolton and Houlihan (2005); Poster (2007); Korczynski (2009); Mirchandani (2012); Aneesh (2015). 2 For an early overview of the causal factors, managerial ideologies and consequences of growing ‘management by customers’ in service labour settings, see Fuller and Smith (1991). Korczynski and Ott (2004) examine how the management production of the ‘enchanting myth of the sovereign client’ in service interactions emerges as a way of balancing the tensions and contradictions arising from the growing rationalisation and control of production in parallel with a growing insistence on the dissemination of a logic of customer-​orientation (quality). The promotion of the ‘enchanting myth of the sovereign client’ enables management to detach clients from the constraints of rationalised production, while also making them feel that they are ‘sovereign’. However, in the midst of such developments, Korczynski and Ott also suggest that the ‘myth’ regularly creates and reproduces the conditions for its negation. One of the forms through which the enabling conditions of the sovereign client are disputed and challenged emerges precisely when

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workers transform the service interaction from an economic exchange into a socially embedded encounter (2004: 591). This theme is explored later in this chapter. 3 The director was making a direct reference to what is often designated as the Toyota Production System, or Toyotism, developed between the 1950s and the 1970s in Japan. This method of car manufacture was introduced broadly as a way of overcoming the rigidities of Fordist production. From the 1990s onwards it became known as ‘lean manufacture’. The two driving forces of the Toyota Production System are avoidance of waste –​of any kind, including labour materials and the workforce –​and increased labour flexibility. Toyotism is also often referred to as ‘just-​in-​time production’, a methodology focused on the aligning goods production to consumer demand. 4 The main three motives for making a call are information, request and complaint. 5 Calculated as (number of calls answered in the first 30 seconds + number of calls abandoned in the first 20 seconds) ÷ total number of calls received. 6 The average service level is calculated as number of calls received ÷ (number of calls answered + number of calls missed after 20 seconds in the queue). 7 As noted in Chapter  2, Portugal’s peripheral condition in the world capitalist system was shaped by various factors, including more than forty years under a Fascist regime. The majority of the population was involved in highly exploitative labour conditions, having to mobilise mutual networks of kin, friendship and community to access essential livelihood resources. Anthropological studies focusing on small-​scale rural communities in Portugal from the late 1960s to the 1980s document the existence of ingrained practices of patron–​client relationships pervading the ways in which peasants and rural workers secured access to material and non-​material livelihood resources, and the links between political clientelism and structural patterns of class inequality (see e.g. Cutileiro 1971; Silva 1994). Operators’ explanations of clients’ expectations in terms of the dictatorship are grounded in an experience of work that they perceive as anachronistic and disconnected from their generation’s material and moral expectations of entitlement to a greater equality, respect and democratisation between workers and employers. 8 How call centre operators, similarly to workers in other economic sectors, invest in doing a job well and taking pride in what they do, being praised and rewarded for solving a client’s request or complaint, is a relatively neglected dimension in the call centre literature –​suggesting an assumption on the part of authors that in highly routinised, repetitive and controlled workspaces there is no possibility of workers deriving a sense of satisfaction, self-​worth and fulfilment from what they do. In her study of routinisation processes in MacDonald’s restaurants, Leidner (1993) notes that workers who enjoy following scripts or do not resist routines are either taken to be miserable or as a ‘theoretical embarrassment’ to critics of routinisation. More recently, in her ethnography of luxury service in North American hotels –​a context pervaded by a high degree of structural inequality between those being served and those doing the serving –​Sherman (2007) also notes that ‘even when workers describe elements of their relations with customers as meaningful, scholars tend not to theorize the positive aspects of these contacts’ (22). I am stressing the importance of not underestimating the significance of call centre operators’ subjective feelings, investments and moral valuations vis-​à-​vis their tasks and their clients, because they enable us to capture how relationships of authority and exploitation involve the intersection of material and moral struggles. While I share Bourdieu’s insight that the investment each worker puts into their work in order to retrieve from it some kind of reward irreducible to the wage is both a part of and a precondition for the ‘misrecognition of the objective truth of labour as exploitation’ (2000:  202), I  also think that the exploited worker’s feelings, values and socially embedded premises of moral action

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are determined by but not reducible to any ‘objective truth of labour as exploitation’. Following James Scott (1977, 1985), I suggest that call centre operators’ investments and pleasures in their work open up a powerful window of observation and analysis onto the relational intersections and contradictions between structured conditions of exploitation and the feelings of the exploited.

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The production of agency: humans disguised as robots

Moments are the elements of profit.

(Marx 1990 [1867]: 352)

The chapter of Karl Marx’s Capital concerning ‘the working day’ –​from which the quotation above is taken –​is a crucial piece of writing regarding temporality and the creation of surplus value in the capitalist labour process. Marx analyses, with demographic detail, why and how the limits of the working day were (and will continue to be) a fundamental issue of the struggle between capitalists and workers. Both parties involved in the dispute know (from different perspectives) that the limits of the working day establish the pattern of work; more importantly, the working day establishes how the extraction of surplus value is organised in time and space at the level of production. The working day is also an apparatus that disciplines, controls and normalises conduct and behaviour both inside and outside the workplace. In sum, the disciplinary apparatus contained in the working day is a definitive part of the process of creating surplus value: that is, the process by which labour power is consumed and value is created –​how moments become elements of profit. In this chapter, I examine how discipline (work time), quantification and surveillance are embedded within the call centre’s daily organisation of work in order to disclose the specific characteristics of the nature of value creation in the sector. In simplified terms, maintaining the sector’s profitability is dependent on the operator’s effective and efficient execution of its main task: dealing with clients. As I  will show, the rigid and extreme control to which operators are subjected does not prevent them from evading that control by deploying ‘strategies of improvisation’, mainly through their use of language and communication skills. Thus, I argue that the central paradox pertaining to the nature of value creation within call centres is that the uncontrollable –​intervention by the human agent –​ is what is effective in terms of productive output, leading to profit creation. All the sections of this chapter are particularly focused on describing and examining the conditions under which this central paradox is produced. It is my aim not to provide a defence of Marx’s labour theory of value but rather to scrutinise the mechanisms used in the sector to control workers’ time.

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The chapter is structured as follows. Before considering the production process inside the workspace more closely, I describe how the call centre sector, as presented by the APCC, understands the nature of the business, and the techniques deployed to assure profitability. I  then move on to analyse how the business practices and rhetoric put forward by the APCC are expressed on the shop floor. These techniques contain within themselves a latent contradiction between qualitative and quantitative targets of productivity –​a fundamental contradiction in the call centre literature.1 My description and analysis of this contradiction will reveal the extent to which the call centre labour regime might be defined as a regime of disciplined agency –​an advanced system for the exploitation of a rarefied form of the human labour power:​linguistic engagement, or human communicative competence. The deployment of such a form of labour power under the conditions of production I examine ensures the creation of a surplus value: agentive human intervention. In call centres, the ultimate commodity created in the labour process and exchanged through the operator’s telephone transactions with clients is not language, information, affects or emotions, but human agency, expressed through the uniquely human quality of language. ‘Strategic management’, benchmarking and outsourcing in the call centre business The APCC2 was founded in 2005, with the goal of promoting a ‘sustainable development of the activity of contact centres in Portugal’.3 According to the vice-​ president of the association, one of its main goals is to promote adherence to the rhetoric and practice of ‘strategic management’ among its members.4 The APCC has been promoting such management rhetoric mainly through the organisation of international conferences and studies of the use of ‘benchmarking’ in Portugal’s call centres. ‘Benchmarking’, a common tool in many businesses, involves measuring one’s working practice against the best (the benchmark) in the sector in order to make improvements that will reach that benchmark. In call centres this means scrutinising labour costs, quantitative and qualitative productivity, the distribution of the industry in the country and its growth in different sectors of the economy to establish the ‘best practice’. When speaking to me, the vice-​president of the association emphasised that this is highly important because ‘in order for a service to be managed, it has to be measured’. These ‘benchmarking reports’ are exchanged not only among national members of the association but also with international networks of the industry.5 The reports cover the following. • Outsourcing: measuring the percentage of work that has been outsourced. • ‘Human resources’:  the relationship between the number of persons working in the call centre and the number of those in answering positions; rate of staff turnover. • ‘Quality control’: internal and external monitoring of operators’ performance (internally through call monitoring and externally by surveying the callers on

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their ‘level of satisfaction’); number of call centres with accreditation and certification according to the ISO 9000.6 • ‘Performance indicators’: average call duration, average hold time, average time to answer a call, average number of missed calls, average service level (number of calls received ÷ (number of calls answered + number of calls missed after 20 seconds in the queue), average number of calls answered per hour, etc. • ‘Technology’:  the percentage of call centres using a given technology. The most common technological equipment used in call centres consists of: (1) the ACD –​a server connected to a telephone exchange designed to distribute calls among available operators, (2) CTI –​according to the benchmarking report ‘a tool that allows the optimisation of the operator’s time because it displays in real time details of the client calling the line’ (APCC 2009: 154) and (3) IVR, defined as ‘self-​service’, by which clients get to the department they need by pressing numbers on their keypads. • ‘Activity volume’: this measures the number of incoming and outgoing calls by economic sector and the size of the call centre. • ‘Operating costs’: the cost of labour. This measures the average wage of operators and team leaders, the average cost of training, etc. These items are compared in the benchmarking reports and are the aspects on which firms should concentrate in their daily operations. Further to these, outsourcing is also considered in great detail. In the last benchmarking study promoted by APCC (2018: 56), 53 per cent of the companies surveyed reported outsourcing their call centre services. The companies that outsource their customer services often do so to TWAs. Between the main company and the TWA there is a payment agreement generally comprising partly ‘fixed costs’ and partly ‘variable costs’. The fixed costs for the company contracting out the services can be established according to either (1) each hour of the operators’ work, (2) each call answered or (3) the total number of calls answered per month. The ‘variable costs’ are dependent on service level agreements (SLAs) between the two parties that establish agreed goals for the number of calls answered per day, the average call duration, etc. If the service provider does not meet a standard specified in the SLA, it is its responsibility to compensate the client company financially. In 2017, 70 per cent of the companies participating in the APCC benchmarking study reported having a payment model based on the number of calls answered, while 53 per cent used a model based on the number of contracted hours of work (2018: 57). During my fieldwork, I  was not allowed to consult the official agreement between EVA and the TWA. Nevertheless, it was common for operators to discuss this topic –​EVA’s specific contractual agreement as well as the extensive use of outsourcing in the sector –​using information gained informally, and as a way of criticising the highly exploitative conditions or their employment relationship with EVA and the TWA. Operators emphasised, on the one hand, the considerable gap between their wages and what EVA paid to the service provider, and, on the other, the harm caused by their treatment as disposable workers on different terms from permanent staff. Their employment conditions could be significantly

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improved, in terms of both security and level of earnings, if they were hired directly by the user firm as permanent employees. One operator remarked:

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Probably EVA pays the TWA around €1,000 or €1,200 per operator, and we end up receiving €600 at the end of the month! I think that … what firms gain by this is that they don’t have to worry if they fire a specific worker; they do not need to pay him any social benefits. But at the same time, I think that if EVA contracted the workers directly, it could also save some money.

The dominant macro-​business orientation in the Portuguese call centre sector is of a strong pursuit of profitability through a combination of consistent processes of productivity measurement, evaluation and outsourcing. This is manifested on the shop floor in particular techniques of discipline, labour metrics and surveillance: techniques embedded in the organisation of work, shaping the transactions between operators and clients, and between operators and management. Frames of self-​discipline: the ‘code of conduct’ and ‘performance evaluations’ Every call centre has specific rules concerning modes of conduct and behaviour inside the workplace. They usually form a set of disciplinary devices constraining the the way work and social relationships are conducted. Two of the disciplinary devices most common in Portuguese call centres operating in different economic sectors are the ‘code of conduct’ and ‘performance evaluations’. Three months after beginning my fieldwork I was informed by one of the team leaders that it was necessary to email the call centre’s code of conduct to all its operators.7 He found this necessary because some operators were complaining that some of their colleagues were not following the rules of ‘healthy hygiene’. The best way he could find to handle such a sensitive issue was by sending everyone the code of conduct, which included rules on hygiene.

The EVA code of conduct Everyone should follow the instituted procedures and respect them. In case of doubt you should consult your team leader. This code of conduct should be a reminder to the Assistants not to forget the composure they should maintain inside the call centre, which should be guided by professionalism and mutual respect. One should show to colleagues and senior leaders the same kind of respect, attention and cordiality that we have towards our clients. ‘Breaks’ and similar issues We appeal to the good sense of everyone concerning the ‘break times’. When you are inside the building, you should use all the existing receptacles for the

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different kinds of garbage (plastic, food and cigars) in order that everyone can enjoy greater well-​being.

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Clothing and personal hygiene The clothing you wear should be suitable for a workplace and demonstrate excellent presentation, and you should take care of personal hygiene. For obvious reasons, beach clothing or any other kind of clothing with typed inscriptions that might contain concepts of political, racial or religious discrimination are not allowed. Food You are not allowed to eat or drink inside the workplace. The canteen is provided for this purpose and can be used during break times. The consumption of alcoholic drinks inside the call centre is expressly forbidden, as is working after consuming such drinks. Mobile phones Mobile phones should be kept in silent mode in order not to disrupt the normal functioning of the call centre. Internet Internet access should be used only for professional purposes. Consulting the internet should be used exclusively to help your professional functions. Email Email use is only for professional purposes, and all the messages should be sent with the CC of your direct team leader. In the email signature the name of your team leader should be visible. Installations Given that everything was made to provide a good working environment, we hope that everyone will handle the installations with care, while helping to maintain good conditions. At the end of each shift, Assistants should put their headsets in the locker and should be sure not to leave rubbish or papers on their desks. It is not permitted to install any software on the computers.

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Call recording and monitoring of computer screens In order to obtain greater quality control, improve client transactions and the quality of the information required, and to achieve greater personal development of colleagues, EVA monitors phone calls with clients, using recording mechanisms. This monitoring includes voice registration and the handling of the computer applications used in handling calls, through to the conclusion of all customer service activities. Smoking It is expressly forbidden to smoke inside the the call centre, the canteen and the toilets. Reading and games It is forbidden to read any material that is not related to work. It is forbidden to play games on the computers or any other device. Breaks The times of breaks should be respected so that everyone may have a break without impacting colleagues’ work or service levels. Punctuality You should be at work on time, allowing for five minutes before the start of your shift to turn on the computer and open the applications. Delays may be counted against the productivity award. Diligence You should not skip work, and if there are occasions when you have to you should warn your team leader on the day before so that arrangements may be made to keep the number of Assistants available in accordance with the service level. Professional confidentiality Colleagues should preserve the confidentiality of the business while in the workplace as well as outside it.

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The code of conduct is one of the ‘frames’ that structures informal and formal interactions inside the workspace.8 A  careful reading of this code reveals the main reasons for the necessity of disciplining the workforce. ‘Professionalism’ is emphasised, as well as the ‘service level’. Operators are not allowed to read anything, play games or talk to each other between calls because this might have consequences for the service level. They should not be absent from work because this might also have an impact on the service level. Here I wish to bring out the numerical abstraction of the service level, which is omnipresent in the workplace, as will become clearer in the next section. The code of conduct is necessary, not only as a frame of normative behaviour inside the workspace, but also in order to manage the SLAs. One operator, when asked about the code, said: The TWA was hiring me, the TWA had its problems, but it was only following the orders of the client [he means EVA –​operators frequently refer to the user firm as the client]. And the client orders workers to have a certain way of being in the job. Sometimes, bosses, who were my friends, used to pass by me, and I was reading the newspaper, and they would say ‘Look, you should put the newspaper away; if there is a visit from the client to our section we can get a big fine because of that. I am telling you this because they can even know without coming here because there are cameras around the place. So you should not be reading the newspaper.’

The code of conduct is elaborated and executed with the total agreement of the user firm both whether the call centre is in house or off site. Such sets of rules can be found in other forms of work with regard to the use of the space and work tools. In call centres, however, they gain a different dimension because of the system of monitoring the pace of work. Under ‘Call recording and monitoring of computer screens’, workers are warned that ‘in order to obtain greater quality control’ their calls, as well as their actions on the computer, are recorded (in the case of the computer the screen is visually recorded while the operator is working). The operator’s words, gestures and actions are indirectly recorded by what appears on the screen as a result of their actions. The code of conduct is a frame of self-​discipline that constrains behaviour and social transactions between colleagues and superiors inside the workspace. The code also anticipates the forms of evaluation to which operators are subject. Within call centres, workers’ performance evaluation is divided into two kinds in line with the productivity metrics we have seen: qualitative and quantitative. Every time assistants answer a call, they must follow a grid established by EVA that moulds the transaction between operator and client. This grid shapes the form and the content of the conversation. The operators know from the start that they will be judged according to this grid by team leaders every time they carry out evaluations.9 These take place once a month, and future operators are told to follow a set of ‘orientations’ (which team leaders also use to evaluate). The orientations are divided into three groups: ‘amiability and sympathy’, ‘technical competence’ and ‘speed of resolution’. In the first group, the following recommendations are made:

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• call the client by their first and last name; • have a smile in your voice; • always confirm if the client is available to hold the line while you search for information; • say ‘thank you’ before and after holding;10 • explain to the client in clear terms why you are going to put them on hold; • check the client’s availability to do equipment tests with you; • use reassuring and sympathetic expressions. In the second group, ‘technical competence’, includes: • • • • • •

use a firm voice when giving information to the client; eliminate negative expressions in your speech; present alternatives to the clients before presenting limitations; do not use ‘ready-​made expressions’; it may indicate insecurity; be sure that any operations run by the client are successful; run tests. Finally, ‘speed in the resolution’ comprises:

• • • •

stay on the line with the client while they carry out any operations; explain to the client what operations they will need to execute and why; when you put the client on hold, return to the line regularly;11 at the end of the call, log and ‘categorise’ the contact.12

These instructions on correct behaviour are bound by contradictions that only become apparent in practice, and that operators describe as one of the most challenging aspects of the job. They are obliged to display specific emotions in their voices (sympathy, friendliness, a smiling voice), while simultaneously eliminating opposite, ‘negative’ emotions. They need to show deference towards the client but also to convey security. They have to register information on several software applications, but they also need to be aware that there are time limitations associated with each task. What is demanded of them is synchrony of gestures, actions and speech specific to each client (such as calling the client by their name) with standardised technical rules (such as categorising and logging each contact at the end of the call). One of the team leaders at EVA, João, had a recurrent sentence to evoke the dilemma the operators have to bear: ‘You know, Patrícia, the problem is that the little man of quantity never meets the little man of quality.’ It is a dilemma that they face in every call, and that team leaders have to justify every time they are asked for monthly quantitative and qualitative results. The rules of conduct are understood as the qualitative aspects of the job. Operators should thus follow them as the principles that ensure ‘good-​quality customer service’. However, this set of principles has to be articulated with the quantitative targets that operators need to achieve individually. The extensive use of computer-​based technologies to evaluate employees’ quantitative performance, combined with the systematic surveillance of their work activities, embodies management’s response to the problem

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of marrying quantity and quality in such a way as to maintain profitability. I get back to this theme in the conclusion of the chapter. Before that, I will examine the quantitative techniques of labour measurement deployed at EVA.

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‘We are only numbers to them’: quantification and numbering The measurement of an operator’s output is done by both the qualitative prescriptions I have described and methods of quantification. These methods usually take the form of productivity reports evaluating almost all the tasks performed in the course of work. For operators they are an alienating mechanism that reduces both the worker and their labour to ‘a number’. Everyday team leaders send the kind of information shown in Table 6.1 to the operators and coordinators. These reports are the only knowledge directors have of the work being done on the shop floor. It was quite common to hear operators referring to the productivity reports with ‘We are only numbers for them!’. This sentence was repeated many times, and epitomised the understanding operators have of how the top hierarchy perceives their work. The productivity report is organised by operator name, logging number of calls answered during the day and per hour, average call duration, hold time, NR (‘not ready’), time spent on breaks, idle time, talk time (the proportion of time spent talking on the phone while being logged into the system), and logged time (during which the operator was clocked in). There are set targets for each of these metrics, shown in bold at the end of the table. For instance, operators are supposed to answer 4.5 calls per hour; the target established for the ‘average call duration’ is 480 seconds, and time spent on breaks should not exceed 15 per cent of the total shift. The data in italics correspond to results that need to be improved in order to meet the desired targets. The data required for the ‘productivity reports’ are obtained via a specific program called Symposium to which only team leaders and the team coordinator have access. Figure  6.1 shows the typical report extracted using this application, which monitors and records all the details of the worker’s shift. Counting is a constant activity at the centre. Activities at every level of the internal hierarchy are transformed into numbers. Operators pay attention to the number of calls answered, the minutes spent on breaks and the hours to go until the end of their shift. Team leaders construct several kinds of reports on work performed, and also receive a number of Excel spreadsheets from other parts of the company containing analysis of the call centre’s activity. The coordinators analyse endless statistics on the performance of the ‘contact unit’ of which they are in charge for comparison with the company’s other contact units. Numbers circulate in talks among colleagues, clients and team leaders as though they contained in themselves all that goes on at the workplace. Through the Symposium software, real-​time information is extracted that is displayed on each contact unit’s ‘wallboard’ (see Figure 6.2). The wallboard, which is quite often referred to in English, is the icon of control and surveillance par

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6.1  Operators’ daily productivity report Date

Login

25-​Jan-​08 25-​Jan-​08 25-​Jan-​08 25-​Jan-​08 25-​Jan-​08 25-​Jan-​08 25-​Jan-​08 25-​Jan-​08 25-​Jan-​08 25-​Jan-​08 25-​Jan-​08 25-​Jan-​08 25-​Jan-​08 25-​Jan-​08 25-​Jan-​08 25-​Jan-​08 25-​Jan-​08 25-​Jan-​08 25-​Jan-​08 25-​Jan-​08 25-​Jan-​08 25-​Jan-​08

4493 4514 4522 4509 4496 4507 4500 4525 4511 4506 4488 4521 4502 4491 4526 4490 4519 4515 4516 4510 4489 4487

Forenamea

Total calls answered

Calls answered per hour

Average call duration

% hold time

% NR

0.00 2.00 4.00 8.00 8.00 9.00 9.00 10.00 11.00 11.00 12.00 13.00 16.00 16.00 17.00 17.00 18.00 18.00 20.00 24.00 25.00 25.00

0.00 0.27 0.68 1.52 1.38 2.65 1.66 1.29 1.64 1.92 1.53 1.61 2.52 2.94 2.19 2.24 3.00 3.33 2.49 2.93 2.92 3.08

0.00 387.00 482.75 383.63 430.00 919.89 1274.00 786.30 428.45 1233.91 973.67 306.31 556.81 666.81 410.47 685.06 531.83 544.89 794.35 677.58 579.72 816.20

0.00 0.75 1.33 1.38 3.43 0.00 11.35 5.05 4.07 2.83 3.20 3.81 11.57 9.11 5.72 2.24 1.52 8.07 22.94 11.99 1.29 3.27

12.59 6.90 4.66 0.01 8.58 6.07 21.99 17.44 11.81 9.88 6.94 4.23 21.70 8.81 12.81 11.84 14.43 10.30 8.40 8.83 22.53 6.94

% idle

63.87 87.59 80.26 83.00 74.07 23.40 19.12 41.48 61.69 23.65 42.95 62.16 23.26 32.32 52.59 43.26 39.63 31.40 31.92 26.79 22.26 22.58

% talk

0.00 2.89 9.08 16.25 16.45 67.82 58.66 28.24 19.56 65.76 41.43 13.72 38.98 54.37 25.00 42.60 44.38 50.44 54.91 55.16 47.04 69.90

Logged time 6.16 7.44 5.91 5.25 5.81 3.39 5.43 7.73 6.69 5.73 7.83 8.06 6.35 5.45 7.75 7.59 5.99 5.40 8.04 8.19 8.56 8.11

(Continued)

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Table 6.1 Cont. Date

Login

25-​Jan-​08 25-​Jan-​08 25-​Jan-​08 25-​Jan-​08 25-​Jan-​08 25-​Jan-​08 25-​Jan-​08 25-​Jan-​08

4523 4513 4494 4528 4504 4492 4524 4527

Forenamea

Total calls answered

Calls answered per hour

26.00 28.00 35.00 1.00 2.00 3.00 4.00 5.00

3.38 3.47 4.36 0.13 0.34 0.34 0.51 0.63 4.50

Names have been omitted to protect anonymity.

a

Average call duration 289.54 526.04 518.71 460.00 101.00 170.00 334.25 199.20 480.00

% hold time

% NR

1.44 7.89 9.84 1.04 0.00 0.29 0.00 0.25 10.00

11.79 16.89 10.48 10.86 0.01 13.81 4.01 9.32 15.00

% idle

59.68 30.77 24.41 81.73 96.48 79.40 90.10 78.24 44.16

% talk

27.19 50.68 62.87 1.64 0.95 1.62 4.71 3.47 38.54

Logged time 7.69 8.07 8.02 7.80 5.88 8.77 7.88 7.98

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6.1  Worker report as formulated by Symposium

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6.2  The ‘wallboard’

excellence. The wallboard shows the current status of activity in numbers:  the number of calls waiting to be answered; the number of operators currently logged into the system; how many are on a break; the actual waiting time of the last client to call. The wallboard is such a powerful symbol of control for two reasons. First, it is the physical embodiment of counting and quantifying as a means of rationalising and objectifying the work process. It follows the ideal of ‘informational transparency’, according to which numbers are supposed to convey objective information for all to see, or ‘self-​apparent facts free from the distortions of social information’ (Zaloom 2006: 62). The numbers on the wallboard acquire an air of authority over tasks because of the characteristics attributed to them by management: neutral and efficient measurement. Second, because the wallboard acquires an authority that is independent of its human subjects, it not only reifies the vigilance exerted directly by team leaders and team coordinator by rendering it in physical form; it also instils self-​surveillance. In a chapter comprising historical meditations on the rise of statistics, Ian Hacking commented that ‘the bureaucracy of statistics imposes not just by creating administrative rulings but by determining classifications within which people must think of themselves and of the actions that are open to them’. He further added that from his perspective the two most important philosophical questions raised by the advent of statistics are the ‘erosion of determinism and the taming of chance’ (Hacking 1991: 194).

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The wallboard instils self-​surveillance because it reduces the frame of possible available actions for operators. During a call the operator may have time gaps when all they need to do is reiterate something they explained earlier. The automatism that management seeks from workers is achieved through several mechanisms, one of which is the repetition inherent to the work. When all that needs to be explained is already memorised, there are few things to look at apart from the wallboard. It shows the worker the number of calls still waiting that they will have to answer, but it also shows if there are not too many people on break, which means that there may be the possibility of taking one too. Moreover, the blank walls common in call centres, the frequent absence of windows, the separation of workers in cubicles mean that the space is explicitly arranged so that the worker has no other direction to look other than towards their computer screen or, above it, the wallboard. Strategies of improvisation and the production of agency The frames of self-​discipline, the techniques of qualitative and quantitative performance evaluation deployed by management and the extensive surveillance of interpersonal transactions, the tasks and work organisation form an apparatus of labour control. They pervade the call centre’s working days with a degree of systematisation that regiments and normalises conduct, behaviour and ways of talking. However, as I mentioned earlier, they contain within themselves a latent contradiction that I  described using one team leader’s phrase:  ‘the little man of quantity never meets the little man of quality’. Maintaining this contradiction allows management to exploit something that is not reducible to the mere act of talking on the phone:  the capacity of workers to be individual agents, or their agential capacity. By this, I mean an irreducible quality of human beings, the capacity for complex symbolic thinking expressed through the medium of language. The emotional and physical labour demanded of operators in order to balance qualitative and quantitative goals may be expressed through a technique that, although not formally learnt, is in constant use: improvisation. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the verb as ‘create and perform (music, drama, or verse) spontaneously or without preparation’ and ‘make from whatever is available’. The ability to improvise ways of meeting both qualitative and quantitative demands depends almost solely on the individual operator: their agential capacity to make autonomous decisions, putting themselves into ‘someone else’s shoes’; their ability to ‘imagine what is happening at the other end of the line’; as well as their creativity. While following Sérgio, an operator who had been working at the call centre for the last three years, an illustrative episode occurred. Operators did not have to press a button on the keypad to take a call; calls were automatically distributed among available operators.13 Before answering, the operator would hear a sharp tone, and would then introduce themselves: ‘Hello, my name is … how may I help you?’. On one of the many days I shadowed Sérgio, there was an unusual number of calls queued owing to damage to the telephone exchanges in the north of the country. The first call he answered was a complaint concerning some other subject.

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Sérgio decided to run some tests with the client, although he was not sure what the outcome would be. To his relief it was good. The call went on for twenty minutes. The next call Sérgio answered was a much more serious complaint from a client who had contacted the support line several times before. The client said that on his previous call it had been answered and then he had heard people chatting and having fun. According to the client, the operator did not notice that he was receiving a call, and when he did realise he hung up. With this very angry client there was no response Sérgio could give except to apologise on behalf of the company. He commented to me that such incidents often happen because some of his colleagues take off their headsets, meaning they may not hear that a call is being answered by the system. In the next call, which lasted for an hour and a half, the client was waiting for his username and password in order to access the internet. According to company procedures, this kind of information should not be given over the phone for security reasons. Sérgio knew this, but at the same time, after trying to give the caller access by other means, he knew that the only way to solve his problem was to tell him his login credentials. After almost ninety minutes, during which most of the time was spent discussing general issues of internet use and how to use the router, Sérgio decided to give the client his username and password. He knew he was breaking a serious rule, but at the same time he felt compensated by the customer’s pleasant reaction. In their daily work operators continually have to deploy their agential capacity to improvise in order to balance and manage the contradiction latent in the call centre labour process. This contradiction exists because there is an aspect of unpredictability that cannot be solved solely by machines. This unpredictability arises from the client’s motives and problems, which occur on all commercial and technical helplines, regardless of the kind of call centre. It is a dimension that became especially acute from the 1980s onwards, when Taylorist methods of labour control, initially applied to manufacturing, expanded into service labour processes with the aim of simultaneously enhancing the rationalisation and standardisation of the services provided, as well as their affective, emotional qualities (Braverman 1974; Hochschild 1983; Paules 1991). Greta Foff Paules, drawing on her ethnography of waitressing in the USA, notes that: customers contribute to the chaotic nature of restaurant work and help thwart efforts to rationalize service by introducing an uncontrollable degree of irregularity into the service process. They invariably request the unexpected, reject what they are supposed to demand, arrive when they should be leaving, and stay when they should go. They are the ultimate wild card that ensures that service industries will never become smoothly regulated, steadily ticking factories; and that waitresses will never become mere cogs in a service machine. As long as it is the waitress’s job to minister to the unpredictable needs and tastes of her parties, she will need to innovate, to evaluate, to order and reorder priorities –​to think. (Paules 1991: 83)

In call centres, management might create typologies derived from a systematic analysis of clients’ calls logged on databases; it might even create specific scripts

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for answering calls based on the same typologies, which might reduce the average call-​time (thereby augmenting the relative surplus value through technology). It might also reduce the variable capital associated with labour costs through the extensive use of outsourcing. However, it can never assure total control over the conversation itself. For that, direct human intervention is needed, and this is not reducible simply to speaking. It demands listening, processing information, anticipating results, creating solutions, imagining (putting yourself in someone else’s shoes) and conceptualising before seeing (imagining what is happening at the other end of the line). In sum, it requires articulation in language, which is what distinguishes human beings from all other species. It is precisely this irreducible human capacity that the apparatus of control within the call centre’s labour regime attempts to regiment and control. Both earlier and more recent studies on call centre work have considered the significance of unwritten rules, informal procedures and going beyond the script to the successful execution of the operators’ work. Winifred Poster’s study on ‘national identity management’ within transnational call centres in India reports that: while call centre workers are expected to memorise dialogue and repeat standardised phrases for certain prompts or questions by customers, the script is not enough for this job. Constructing and conveying clues about national identity requires a substantial amount of improvising. It also demands much more creativity and active participation by workers. (Poster 2007: 298).

Kiran Mirchandani notes that in the early and mid-​2000s call centre work in India was strongly shaped by scripted Taylorism, with operators having to interact with clients according to ready-​made conversation scripts appearing on their computer screens. From the mid-​2000s onwards, as a consequence of overseas customer dissatisfaction and backlash, an emerging tendency among management was to downplay the importance of scripts in favour of the valorisation of operators who engaged in ‘smart work’ practices (such as ignoring scripts when it is obligatory to follow them), and of those who sounded ‘natural’ and were ‘innovative’ in their linguistic interactions with clients (Mirchandani 2012: 87–​8). In his undercover research in a high-​volume sales call centre in Britain, Jamie Woodcock recalls being told during the training process that ‘we need people to make the sales; otherwise we would just use an automated system’ (Woodcock 2017:  41), and being informed by a supervisor in a motivational buzz session that ‘there is no better call centre worker than the one who can improvise around the script!’ (74). Although call centre studies stress the significance of the scripted together with the unscripted for the efficient execution of the operator’s work and value creation purposes, the call centre labour regime is often predicated on the disembedding, disembodiment, depersonalization and desubjectification of human linguistic agency (Lloyd 2013; Aneesh 2015; Brophy 2017; Woodcock 2017). For instance, A. Aneesh suggests that global interactions in Indian transnational call centres are a paradigmatic expression of an emerging system of governance, designated as algocracy: guided by the rule of the algorithm. The rule of the algorithm, or rule of

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the code, ‘consists of programming schemes embedded in software platforms that structure possible forms of work governance. This system governs work through the design of the work process itself ’ (Aneesh (2015): 87). The algorithm emerges as a device of technical decision-​making, one that governs, limits and directs the possibilities of human action: [P]‌rogramming technologies seek to structure the possible field of action without a similar need for orienting people toward learning the legal rules. Action is controlled neither by socialising workers into regulatory demands, nor by punishing workers for their failure, but by shaping an environment in which there are only programmed alternatives to performing the work. (Aneesh 2015: 88)

More recently, Enda Brophy defines call centre work as the most accomplished example of ‘language put to work’, a concept meant to capture how the proletarianisation and deskilling of a global informational underclass designate ‘capital’s valorization of the human capacity to communicate through language’ (Brophy 2017:  5). Brophy suggests that call centres are ‘geared towards the production of what we could call abstract communication, or communication that is instrumental, homogeneous, measurable, and thereby divorced from the concrete knowledge, abilities, or experience of those who enact it’, in which ‘the human capacity for relationality is reduced to a limited set of allowable utterances, statements, and responses, all of them tailored towards the maximization of communicative productivity’ (17). ‘Abstract communication’ is thus meant to capture the processes through which linguistic interactions in call centre work are rendered measurable, quantifiable, undifferentiated and predictable by erasing personalised forms of the worker’s engagement with the object of their work, the client. My research suggests a different operationalisation of control, value creation and subjectification in the call centre labour process, one in which the contradictory quantitative and qualitative output requirements are not a prominent limitation to the valorisation process of call centre work (Brophy 2017: 118), but are rather an enabler of the commodification of the agency of human intervention –​through the exploitation and privatisation of linguistic agency labour power –​facilitated by specific historical, moral and relational contingent features. In Chapter  4 I  showed how the organisation of hiring and job assignment within the Portuguese call centre sector draws upon precarity, requiring of workers the contradictory efforts of demonstrating automatism while at simultaneously ‘showing a smile in the voice’. Future call centre operators are thus envisioned as containers of subordination and agency. In Chapter  5 I  showed how the ‘transcendent client’ becomes a matrix around which the intervention into the organisation of work is justified and by which a normative model of work performance is legitimised. I have also suggested that the ambivalent, morally embedded nature of operators’ and clients’ interactions mediates the conditions in and against which the ideology of the ‘transcendent client’ is both internalised and contested, leading operators to envision clients as a source of both professional self-​worth and exploitation, which comes to be translated into a performance of work shaped by either creative intervention or adherence to the model of the robot.

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The production of agency

When operators at EVA deploy their agentive capabilities to confront the contradictory output requirements of quantity and quality, they are motivated in different ways. Some may be moved by the willingness to protect themselves from angry customers; others may wish to enhance their feelings of worth and pride in what they do; others still may be interested in abiding by the company values for career reasons; and finally others may be moved by the wish to sabotage and resist a work process experienced as demeaning, oppressive and mechanical. The motivations for exercising linguistic agentive intervention in the telephone encounter with clients may differ, but they can never occur through the total removal of the contextual and embedded background factors shaping operators’ linguistic abilities to manage, tackle and solve conditions of organisational and moral ambivalence. My suggestion is that the use of technologies to direct, measure, quantify or standardise the emotional and relational capabilities that operators exercise through language is not the only way in which the call centre work process represents an advanced system of labour exploitation. Rather, as we have seen, the process emerges as a regime of disciplined agency, which by sustaining the tension between quantitative and qualitative targets enables the incorporation into the valorisation process of operators’ morally and socially embedded agentive linguistic capacity to make decisions, solve problems. Conclusion My aim in this chapter has been to disclose the specific characteristics of the nature of value-​creation within the call centre sector by examining the deployment of frames of self-​discipline together with computer-​based techniques of labour quantification and surveillance. I have demonstrated the central ideology disseminated by the APCC –​strategic management –​and how this impacts on the shop floor. It does this first by imposing disciplinary mechanisms that regulate interpersonal transactions in the workspace. Operators need to abide by a code of conduct that regulates behaviour and attitudes. They have to follow ‘qualitative prescriptions’ in the course of their work, in order to meet the goals set out in the SLA between the user firm and the TWA, and to meet the qualitative targets. The quantification of labour involves the constant conversion of activities into numbers, enabled by the technological infrastructure available. Commuting everything into numbers also involves the continual monitoring of the operator’s pace of work. The targets set contain a latent contradiction between quality and quantity work outputs that is inherent in service work at a general level: the dilemma between complete individualisation and standardisation (Offe 1985: 106). Since Marx’s seminal analysis of the capitalist labour process, several authors have emphasised how technological innovations originate new forms for disciplining and controlling labour (Braverman 1974; Edwards 1979). In the chapter concerning ‘machinery and large-​scale industry’ in Capital, Marx begins by acknowledging that ‘the machine is a means for producing surplus-​value’ (1990 [1867]: 492). Machines do not produce value but are repositories of past labour,

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which is transferred to the final commodity through the production process (relative surplus value).14 This means that besides allowing greater control over the work process and the intensification of labour, machines also allow the reduction of variable capital involved in production, which is the portion of capital spent on buying labour power. The processes through which new technologies are deployed in call centres for either qualitative or quantitative purposes are intended to maintain a live contradiction between securing automatism and encouraging agential intervention from workers. Within the sector, the code of conduct and the qualitative grid that operators have to follow in their transactions with the clients are modes of both normalising behaviour inside the workplace and enforcing a specific way of talking with the client that follows the company’s marketing rhetoric. The extensive informal (team meetings, email) and formal (productivity reports) monitoring to which workers are subjected is not only a way of making workers accountable for their ‘productivity’. It also ensures that workers will have a disciplined agential intervention in the labour process in order to balance the qualitative and quantitative targets set by management, without which profit maintenance would be impossible. The question of profit maintenance is central in the valorisation process because, as Marx states: Our capitalist … wants to produce a commodity greater in value than the sum of the values of the commodities used to produce it, namely the means of production and the labour-​power he purchased with his good money on the open market. His aim is to produce not only a use-​value, but a commodity; not only use-​value, but value; and not just value, but also surplus-​value. (Marx 1990 [1867]: 293)

To achieve this discipline and control over the uses of socially necessary labour time is absolutely indispensable:  ‘all wasteful consumption of raw material or instruments of labour is strictly forbidden, because what is wasted in this way represents a superfluous expenditure of quantities of objectified labour, labour that does not count in the product or enter into its value’ (Marx 1990 [1867]: 302). A disciplined labour force is therefore necessary in order to avoid making production more expensive. Marx explains this point by comparing it with the slavery regime of antiquity. In a revealing footnote, he writes that the expression used in antiquity to designate and distinguish slaves from animals was instrumentum vocale (speaking implement); animals were designated as instrumentum semi-​ vocale (303). The reason production was more expensive under slavery is that living creatures kept their character: But he himself [the slave] takes care to let both beast and implement feel that he is none of them, but rather a human being. He gives himself the satisfaction of knowing that he is different by treating the one with brutality and damaging the other con amore. Hence the economic principle, universally applied in this mode of production, of employing only the rudest and heaviest implements, which are difficult to damage owing to their very clumsiness. (303)

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The production of agency

Thus, production under slavery was more expensive because of the lack of agility and robustness in the tools employed –​a consequence of the indiscipline of slaves, constantly reminding both ‘beast and implement that he is none of them, but rather a human being’. In the same vein, call centre operators cannot avoid being human and acting as such, despite the encompassing machine of control established in the workplace. The difference, however, is that, within the call centre labour regime, to act as more than a ‘speaking tool’ is a source of value, and as such it needs to be regulated. It also needs to be concealed within the framework of the ‘transcendent client’ and by an apparatus of quantification and surveillance that dissolves the individual human subject, reducing a heterogeneous group of workers into a collection of human robots. I  am arguing, therefore, that the call centre labour regime is to a certain extent beyond the disciplinary power of the Panopticon as described by Foucault (1977), the rule of the code proposed by Aneesh (2015) or the production of abstract communication (Brophy 2017). Although it seeks to optimise the docility–​utility relation of the working subjects, and govern behavioural and linguistic conduct, rendering them amenable to quantification, its principal aim is to establish a regime of disciplined agency, a regime in which workers’ socially and morally embedded linguistic agentive capabilities are disciplined and incorporated into the valorisation process. Notes 1 The contradictory tension between quantitative and qualitative targets in the call centre labour process is predominantly shaped by scholars working from a labour-​process-​ theory perspective, heavily influenced by Braverman’s (1974) Marxist reading of work in capitalist societies, with a focus on the issues of managerial forms of control and labour resistance. In 1998 Fernie and Metcalf characterised call centres as the ‘new sweatshops’ of the twenty-​first century: ‘for call centres, Jeremy Bentham’s 1791 Panopticon was truly the vision of the future’ (Fernie and Metcalf 1998: 2). The portrait provided by these authors is one in which the operator, who resembles an automaton, is trapped in an ‘electronic panopticon’, in which management has ‘total control’ over the organisation and pace of work. Later studies have challenged what they view as the overemphasis of the panoptical qualities of the call centre’s technological infrastructure and forms of management control (e.g. Taylor and Bain 1999; Bain and Taylor 2000; Taylor et al. 2002). These authors suggest that the call centre’s labour process represents an unprecedented level of expansion in the application of Taylorist methods of labour control with the aid of new information technologies, but nevertheless did not erase the capacity of resistance practices. 2 See www.apcontactcenters.org (accessed March 2020). 3 Some of the data presented in this section were collected in the context of an interview with the vice-​president of the association during my fieldwork in 2009. I was not allowed to record the interview, but permission was given to use his testimony in this book. 4 Robert Lamb defines the concept and practice of strategic management as ‘an ongoing process that evaluates and controls the business and the industries in which the company is involved; assesses its competitors and sets goals and strategies to meet all existing and potential competitors; and then reassesses each strategy annually or quarterly [i.e. regularly] to determine how it has been implemented and whether it has succeeded or needs replacement by a new strategy to meet changed circumstances, new technology,

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new competitors, a new economic environment, or a new social, financial, or political environment’ (Lamb 1984: ix). Measurement, evaluation and control are thus key aspects of strategic management. 5 Such as www.contactcenterworld.com (accessed February 2020). 6 ISO 9000 is a set of standard measures for ‘quality management systems’ that a business activity should have according to the International Organization for Standardization. Such standard measures are outlined according to the science of measurement, metrology. Industrial metrology was initially applied to manufacturing but has since been extended to services. 7 This code of conduct was created by the TWA with the agreement of the user firm. 8 In this section I am following the concept of ‘frame’ as developed by Erving Goffman in Frame Analysis (Goffman 1975). Here he develops, with greater precision than in previous books, the technique of ‘frame analysis’ as a means of producing an ‘analysis of social reality’, following closely the work of William James, who put the question ‘Under what circumstances do we think things are real?’. Goffman provides a set of analytical concepts that are intended to explain how this feeling of reality is constructed and maintained in everyday activity. The main unit of analysis is the ‘character of strips of experienced activity’. According to Goffman, a frame can be defined as ‘principles of organisation which govern events and our subjective involvement in them’ (1975: 11). Frames are basic cognitive structures that guide the perception and representation of reality. 9 The number of evaluations may vary at different call centres. There are those where operators are subjected to daily qualitative evaluations. When this happens at the end of the shift, operators have a meeting with a member of the quality control team who informs the worker of any points needing improvement detected in a sequence of calls. In other centres, operators are evaluated monthly. At the end of each month, operators have a joint meeting with the team leader, who hands out the evaluations on paper with errors noted and recommendations for improvement. At EVA operators had monthly evaluations. Although all the calls were recorded and stored, both the team leaders and the team coordinator had to evaluate five phone calls. These could either be followed in real time, or they could be chosen randomly from the database on which all the calls were stored. 10 The hold time is subject to quantitative measurement, as I have already shown, and discuss further in the next section. 11 Usually it is advised that the client should not wait more than two minutes. 12 ‘Categorising’ the contact involves registering the content of the call in a database of all the company’s clients and reasons for contact. 13 This is an aspect that changed during my fieldwork. To begin with, the operator did have to press a button in order to pick up the call. After my first two months of fieldwork, management decided that in order to make the ‘waiting time’ shorter a new system would be implemented, one whereby operators had to wear their headsets all the time in case they lost the call. 14 Unlike authors such as Rifkin (1995), who prophesied the ‘end of work’, George Caffentzis (1997) argued that the increase in rates of unemployment, particularly since the 1970s, did not indicate a reduced need for work and workers, but rather that ‘the creation of unemployment is an instinctual capitalist stratagem for increasing the mass of available labour power while reducing its value’ (31). Furthermore, according to Caffentzis, some social scientists were led to believe that the new technological innovations were qualitatively different from the previous ones, thereby deducing that ‘machines can create value, hence surplus value and profits’ (1997: 31). These social scientists failed to see that technological innovation does not necessarily alter the nature of capitalist accumulation.

7

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The dispossessed precariat

Previously I  have focused on the call centre labour process, particularly the processes operating at the shop floor level. In this chapter, however, the focus will be on the workers’ narratives of their work trajectories: their entry into call centre employment and their understanding of the consequences call centre work has for their lives, particularly the feelings of dispossession, shame, stigma and downward social mobility.1 I aim to show how workers’ particular subjectivities and forms of personal dispossession are embedded in historically bounded, intra-​generational life goals integral to the capitalist reconfigurations of the Portuguese economy in the twentieth century and particularities of call centre ‘disciplined agency’. I first provide a socio-​demographical characterisation of the workers interviewed. I next discuss how the feelings of resentment and frustration they express are linked to their frustrated hopes of upward social mobility, and I examine how the temporal experience of dispossession is connected with their internalisation of class inequality. The last two sections address how workers interpret feelings of shame and stigma both within their intimate circle of friends and family and also in the public sphere, where call centre work is seen as inferior and mechanical. Trajectories, social hopes and resentment The vast majority of my interviewees were originally from Lisbon and were born after the April Revolution of 1974. The average age was 28 (Table 7.1). As noted in Chapter  2, the majority of the interviewees’ parents came from a background of clerical, low-​skilled or manual trades with low levels of formal schooling, and had migrated from rural interior regions to Lisbon, particularly during the 1970s, looking for better jobs and better living conditions for themselves and their children (see Table 7.2). Their children were meant to be the generation that would take full advantage of the opening up of the country to Europe, the increased opportunities afforded by a better education and (white-​collar) jobs fitting their educational qualifications. Their children were supposed to be the doutores (doctors, those awarded with a diploma, widely seen as a sign of distinction); they were never able to achieve this. Today most call centre workers carry all these unfulfilled expectations as a burden.

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7.1  Operators’ year of birth and average age Worker

Year of birth

Age on 31 December 2009

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

1982 1985 1984 1977 1980 1982 1984 1983 1978 1988 1985 1977 1980 1981 1983 1979 1974 1974 1980 1982 1986 1978 1973 1984 1976 1977 1979 1978 1981 1980 1979 1980 1985 1985 1983 1981 1977 1984 1987 1982

27 24 25 32 29 27 25 26 31 21 24 32 29 28 26 30 35 35 29 27 23 31 36 25 33 32 30 31 28 29 30 29 24 24 26 28 32 25 22 27 Average age 28

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The dispossessed precariat 7.2  Operators’ parents: level of education and occupation

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Worker

Level of education

Occupation

Father

Mother

Father

Mother

1

4th grade

4th grade

Carpenter

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

4th grade 9th grade 12th grade 4th grade 4th grade 9th grade 9th grade 9th grade 12th grade 4th grade 12th grade 4th grade 4th grade —​ 9th grade 4th grade 4th grade 9th grade 4th grade 12th grade 4th grade

4th grade 12th grade 12th grade 4th grade 4th grade Bacharelato 9th grade 9th grade 12th grade 4th grade 12th grade 4th grade 4th grade 4th grade 9th grade 4th grade 4th grade Bacharelato 9th grade Ba degree 4th grade

23

9th grade

4th grade

24

4th grade

4th grade

25 26

9th grade 4th grade

4th grade 4th grade

27 28

9th grade Licenciatura

Licenciatura Licenciatura

29 30 31 32 33 34 35

12th grade 4th grade 4th grade 4th grade 4th grade 9th grade 9th grade

12th grade 4th grade 4th grade 4th grade 4th grade 9th grade 9th grade

36 37

9th grade 4th grade

9th grade 4th grade

Factory worker Military (Air Force) Bank clerk Operations manager Entrepreneur Senior IT manager Military (Air Force) —​ Bookkeeper Contractor Bank clerk Firefighter Locksmith —​ Salesman Clerk Taxi driver —​ Entrepreneur Military Chief railway technician Technician for Portugal Telecom Retired customer service assistant Civil servant Retired navy mechanic Entrepreneur Borough civil engineer Radio DJ Aeroplane mechanic Entrepreneur Locksmith Farmer Salesman Telecommunications quality manager Clerk Grocery shop assistant

Street cleaner (in the borough of Lisbon) Cleaner Bank clerk Housewife Housewife Secretary Schoolteacher Social worker —​ Civil servant Entrepreneur Civil servant Housewife Social worker Factory cook Quality technician Housewife Housewife Schoolteacher Civil servant Nursing trainer Housekeeper Housewife Supermarket customer service assistant Housewife Hospital cleaner GP Clinical nurse Sound technician Primary school cleaner Housewife Housewife Housewife Secretary Housewife Tailor Housewife (Continued)

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Table 7.2 Cont. Worker

Level of education

Occupation

38 39

4th grade 4th grade

4th grade 4th grade

40

4th grade

4th grade

Lorry driver Retired factory labourer Entrepreneur

Housewife Housewife Cook

Notes 4th grade: primary education 9th grade: equivalent to Key Stage 3 in England and Wales 12th grade: complete secondary education Bacharelato: bachelor’s degree Licenciatura: doctorate

They could not meet these expectations either in terms of social status or of having a ‘life of one’s own’. Most of my interviewees had contact with their parents’ rural background, particularly during school holidays. It was also during these periods that they had their first experiences of unpaid work in the form of agricultural labour. The majority of my interviewees did not characterise these activities as ‘proper work’. When questioned about their first experiences of work most of them did not refer to them, only mentioning them after I pressed them about any experience of ‘working with the family’. ‘Proper work’ for my interviewees meant socially valued work with a stable wage and a career structure –​the opposite of precarious forms of employment, including temporary agency work. This definition of ‘proper work’ is shaped by the social expectations inherited by their generation. They were the generation born ‘in freedom’ as opposed to their parents, who had lived through the years of the dictatorship. Theirs was also an urban and progressive generation that had the potential to achieve high levels of education and fulfil the expectations of upward social mobility nurtured by their parents. As Table 7.3 shows, more than half the workers interviewed were either studying at university or had already completed their degrees.2 Most of them went to state universities, but a small minority attended private ones, which could represent a significant financial investment and, in some cases, sacrifice for parents. Workers were ambivalent about the university experience. On the one hand, it allowed them to accumulate a certain amount of symbolic and cultural capital. On the other, they often avoided talking about their experience of university, as if it were the source of shame and failure. This subject –​not being able to have a job reflecting their qualifications –​was sometimes phrased as their responsibility or, more precisely, their lack of ability. Some of the operators sometimes commented that maybe they had chosen the wrong course or that they had spent much time at parties and social gatherings instead of trying to achieve the grade that might have enabled them to continue their studies. The operators interviewed perceived their degrees as ‘devalued’, and because socially ‘they had had their chance’ (Bourdieu 1999: 423), the failure to find a job that fitted their

The dispossessed precariat

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7.3  Operators’ education levels Worker

Education level

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

12th grade Undergraduate student Undergraduate student Undergraduate student Undergraduate student Undergraduate student Undergraduate student Undergraduate student Bachelor’s degree 12th grade Undergraduate student Bachelor’s degree Undergraduate student Undergraduate student 12th grade 12th grade 12th grade 12th grade Bachelor’s degree Bachelor’s degree Undergraduate student Bachelor’s degree Bachelor’s degree Bachelor’s degree Undergraduate student Bachelor’s degree Bachelor’s degree Bachelor’s degree Bachelor’s degree Bachelor’s degree Bachelor’s degree 12th grade 12th grade 12th grade Undergraduate student Undergraduate student Undergraduate student Bachelor’s degree 12th grade 12th grade

Final level of education, proportion of total 12th grade 27.5% Undergraduate student 37.5% Bachelor’s degree 35%.

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qualifications was felt as their responsibility. The downgrading of qualifications and the loss of a sense of entitlement experienced by the interviewees has been further reinforced by their experiences working in the call centre sector. For the majority of workers, entering call centre employment is connected with the university. Most of them gained knowledge of call centre work through their circle of college friends. Temporary work agencies have a deliberate strategy of recruiting call centre operators this way. One of the TWAs recruiting on behalf of EVA used the strapline: ‘Refer a friend’ in its email logo. It encouraged workers to look among their network of friends to see if any was interested in working at the call centre by offering €50 to the person making the recommendation, as long as the friend referred stayed in the job for a minimum of three months. Throughout their trajectories workers were exposed, on the one hand, to a rhetoric of middle-​class distinction associated with stable employment and educational achievement and, on the other, to the increased flexibility of employment relations that intensified after Portugal joined the EU. For my interviewees, these two conflicting discourses are a source of resentment and frustration, linked to the social aspirations of upward class mobility placed upon them and the frustration they felt as a generation that resulted from their failure to fulfil these aspirations. Ana (30) was born in Alpiarça, a village in the central province of Ribatejo, when her father was already retired after working for more than thirty years as an electrician for the Portuguese national railway company. Her mother was still working as a housekeeper for a family of wealthy landowners in the region. Ana moved to Lisbon at the age of 18 to study social work at a private university. In Lisbon, she lived in a rented room shared with other students, and in order to help her family with the cost of accommodation, food and tuition she started working full-​time in a telecommunications call centre when she was in her fourth year of study. She worked there for six months, from 10.00 a.m. to 19.00 p.m., five days a week, earning around €600. She never went for more than a month without being in paid employment. She left the call centre, she said, because ‘the pressure was tremendous’. Through a friend, she was able to get a secretarial job at an insurance company where she earned slightly more (€700) but had a complicated relationship with the supervisor, whom she considered to be a womaniser. She stayed in this job for four months. She then applied to work at the call centre of another insurance company, where she stayed for a year and a half, until she finished her degree. The salary was the same €600 she had earned in the telecoms call centre. Her job consisted of providing telephone assistance in the case of car and health accidents. She told me there was a lack of rigour in internal promotion, which was the main reason for leaving the job. She obtained her degree in September, and in October presented her letter of resignation at the call centre. In November she started looking for another job and started working part-​time as a telemarketer for another telecommunications company. While she was at this call centre a colleague of hers mentioned the idea of going to London to look for a better job, something that Ana had always aspired to, not only to get to know the city but also because she believed there was the possibility of a better future there. She and her friend decided to move to London, where they found a cheap double

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room to rent in West Ham. She immediately started looking for a job, and after a month was working as a part-​time waitress in a restaurant, earning around £600 per month. The money was not enough to pay the bills, and she got another job in a call centre for Fujitsu-​Siemens, where she made calls in order to schedule sales appointments. The call centre was located outside London; the journey took her forty minutes by train from Victoria station. The salary was quite good  –​£250 pounds per week –​and together with her restaurant salary it was more than enough to ‘get by’. She worked at the call centre during the day and four-​to-​five hours at the restaurant in the evening. The friend who had moved to London with her decided to return to Portugal after six months, and Ana moved in with a Portuguese couple she had met in Portugal while working at the insurance call centre. After some time she returned to Portugal out of loneliness and the lack of emotional family support. She also hoped that maybe things would different in Portugal in terms of job opportunities. On her return from London, she first stayed with her parents. They encouraged her to look for a job in the area for which she was qualified –​social work –​which she did. There was a pronounced bitterness in her voice when she recounted the hundreds of CVs that she sent out to private companies, hospitals, clinics and schools. Because she did not want to be dependent on her parents, she found a job as a waitress in a local restaurant. During the day she bought the newspapers, checked for job vacancies on the internet, wrote letters of application and posted them, and at night she worked at the restaurant. After three months she felt the need for independence, her own space. She received an offer to work at EVA, which she accepted. She told me that she had decided to do a part-​time apprenticeship in social work in order to get experience, because all the vacancies advertised asked for previous experience, which she did not have. She said that maybe she should have done this before going to London, implying that it was partly her responsibility that she had not found a job in her field. At the same time, she had invested in the call centre work because she still hoped of one day to be hired permanently by EVA rather than by the TWA. This investment was intended to give her some security and stability, and to mitigate the ‘frustration’ that both she and her parents experienced, which she described as follows: My parents feel frustrated because I have a degree and did not have an opportunity to find a job in my field. Because … they are right… my parents invested a lot in my course, in economic terms, and they think that … they are right … The only possible good thing I could be doing, which would be good for me, would be to have some professional security in the area for which I qualified –​ for which I studied and in which I invested so much … When my parents see me working in a call centre, earning less than €800, not having a house of my own … they are right, when by the time they were my age they had three daughters and were already stable in their jobs. I do not even think of having a family beyond my partner and myself because neither of us has any financial stability. Today we have jobs, but tomorrow we may not. Being only two people we can more or less

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manage because we are both adults; but with a child, with a life dependent on us … All my close friends are in the same situation because until now they have lived with their parents, with low-​paid and precarious jobs. I think it matters a lot whether or not you are a temporary worker … I would like to be a mother some day … but in this situation, it isn’t possible … I have moments of great frustration. To start with, when I came to this call centre, it was tough to hear some things from clients. Right now it goes in one ear and out the other. Because they do not know who they are talking to, and I  know that from their point of view I am only a voice. They don’t know my qualifications; they don’t know anything about me. They think they are talking with the insurance company … but in the last few months, I have been feeling quite frustrated with myself, also for not having any opportunities inside the company … because I know I am a good worker.

What was most pronounced among all the interviewees were the feelings of resentment at not being able to escape the feelings of inferiority and impotence linked to the experience of precarious and insecure labour, and in particular to the call centre regime. Ana felt this resentment, remarking, for instance, how operators are mistreated by clients, or when reflecting on her parents’ frustration. Like other call centre operators interviewed, she sometimes gave some indication of having internalised her frustration as being her own responsibility. This was exemplified on another occasion when she suggested a reason for not having found a job in social work might have been that she went to London after her degree instead of gaining some unpaid experience. My interviewees’ feelings of resentment and frustration are potent signifiers of the ‘hidden injuries of class’ (Sennett and Cobb 1972), disguised as personal faults. Call centre employment was always characterised as ‘work without a future’ by my interviewees. This notion indicates a significant contextual difference between the value and meaning of call centre work in Portugal vis-​à-​vis, for instance, countries such as India. Call centre work in India has often been portrayed as a harbinger of high-​tech economic modernity, enabling young and college-​educated workers to benefit from higher wages than their parents, pursuing a path of upward social mobility and access to a middle-​class, consumerist lifestyle ethos (Krishnamurthy 2004; Patel 2010; Nadeem 2011; Mankekar and Gupta 2017). Mankekar and Gupta (2017) examine how the transnational call centre sector in India is representative of the intricate relationships among aspirations, technology and upward social mobility in the Global South. The authors note that call centre workers ‘saw their futures in terms of possibility, of crafting for themselves and their families a more comfortable life’ (Mankekar and Gupta 2017:  76). Despite the latent contradictions underpinning such desires and aspirations, the call centre sector in India is associated with the production of a sense of a future. This is in complete contrast to the reality found in Portugal and other European countries, where call centre work is perceived much more as the paradigmatic example of the material and moral dispossession experienced by those labelled as

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part of the so-​called ‘lost generation’ (in Europe) –​or the ‘debt generation’ (in the USA).3 For instance, Lloyd (2013), in his research on call centre work in a small post-​industrial town in the north-​east of England, emphasises how young call centre workers, unlike their parents’ generation, do not benefit ‘from the predictability of everyday life both at work and outside of work’, and experience a lack of ‘faith in incremental progress’, in the idea that ‘their children would do a little better than they did’ (169). Lloyd’s findings resonate with the Portuguese historical reality. Among my informants, articulating the feeling of being trapped in ‘work without a future’ was a way of expressing, and also criticising, the material and moral dispossession of precarious employment in the call centre sector. The notion of ‘work without a future’ encompassed the experience of low wages, insecure employment conditions and perceptions of diminished citizenship rights and entitlements. It also encompassed the experience of being engaged in a socially devalued and deprecated form of service work, symbolising the breakdown and rupture of an intra-​generational moral economy of social reproduction, linking State projects of national development; class aspirations; and life goals grounded on particular entitlements, rights and self-​worth. The aspirations that were projected on to them by their parents’ generation were not only an investment in the transmission of economic capital and property, they were also a commitment to a livelihood model that they cared about and evaluated as better than the one they themselves had (Sayer 2011). For my informants, their feelings of resentment and frustration and their sense of ‘work without a future’ express a sense of the disentitlement of personal value, worth and recognition embedded in the relational and historically bounded disjuncture between subjective expectations and real chances (Bourdieu 2000: 216–​28).4 Social anxieties and call centre work: shame, stigma and family Among workers, it was most common to feel shame for not having met the expectations created by their parents and close family. This feeling of shame was never mentioned directly, but was expressed in different forms by the interviewees. They might refer to the difficulty of explaining to people outside the call centre what precisely the job of an operator consists of, or mention that their parents did not rate the work they were doing as very important, advising them to change to a ‘real job’ as soon as possible. This forced silence regarding what operators do eight hours a day increases the isolation that their job already brings, as described in the previous chapters. Within workers’ close circle of relationships, one of the main consequences of the internalisation of shame is a constant feeling of relational anxiety, which in turn reinforces social and personal isolation. The isolation felt during their shift is extended to the time devoted to leisure activities, and meeting up with and talking to friends. This is exemplified by the following interview extracts where operators refer to the tiredness caused by their work and their inability to talk to others afterwards:

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This kind of job, although it is [only] call centre work, isn’t easy. It’s a type of work that demands a lot from you, mentally speaking; it’s very demanding. I  think people, when it comes to call centres, still don’t understand that … that it isn’t an easy job. [Are you referring to the people that work in call centres or those who don’t?] People from outside mainly. People who work at call centres, they know how it is. And after working at a call centre for a while they understand how complicated it is. It’s tough, it’s a sort of work that means you sometimes arrive home feeling exhausted. [Not wanting to talk to anyone?] Yes … Now it doesn’t happen any more because I don’t have to be answering calls all the time. But there were days, when I was answering phones, that I used to arrive home, and the last thing I wanted to do was to talk to people. Because it is an exhausting job, really exhausting. [Do you feel the need not to talk to anyone after finishing your work shift?] That’s so in my case. Now I am a bit more ‘loose’, but … after spending eight hours talking to people, you go and meet your friends and they start talking. And your head is so messed up that you don’t want to know what they’re talking about, and people are aware of that, they can tell. [Do you think that people who do not work at call centres have any notion of what kind of work you do?] There were six of us in my group of friends, and three of us were working at call centres. The other three did not understand why we always had our heads full of problems, and we did not want to go out or do something. We used to go out only at weekends. They never understood, and we also never understood why they didn’t understand. Even my mother doesn’t understand, and she is my mother … After you’ve worked at a call centre you know how much people suffer, but if you’ve never worked at a call centre you think people who are there can solve every problem. But it’s not like that.

The aspect all interviewees most emphasised was the inability to talk to other people after spending many hours doing exactly that. This might seem like a trivial remark given that there are other occupations where talking is a privileged medium for the accomplishment of a set of expected tasks –​for example a receptionist or a teacher. I have argued in Chapter 6, however, that there is a particular quality to the act of talking in the call centre working regime. I have argued that this regime might be best distinguished as an advanced technological system that allows the exploitation of a specific property of human labour:  linguistic agency. This degree of control differentiates call centre workers from others, such as teachers and receptionists, who also use linguistic agency. In this sense, the inability to talk with friends, close relatives and partners is not merely a result of fatigue (which can be noted in other professions); rather it derives from a form of labour that expropriates from workers a fundamental human tool for meaning-​ making: language engagement. This is not to say that workers do not talk at all with friends and acquaintances; they do, and sometimes with exceptional need. For some of the workers I interviewed it was a relief to have someone to whom they could talk, or, better,

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it was a relief to have someone willing to listen to them, which is something that in their daily lives they cannot expect to have. On the contrary, friends expect to be listened to, to ask for advice and opinions; close relatives demand explanations; partners want to discuss matters of daily life; and so on. The inability to talk and be with friends is a direct consequence of a working regime that reinforces social isolation. This aspect is further emphasised by operators’ feelings of shame about what they do, a consequence of a form of labour that is socially stigmatised as unskilled, downgrading and inferior, and in which workers are considered disposable –​a ‘cog in a machine’, as stated by one interviewee, Victor. Victor (27) was born in Lisbon. He was the only worker I met at EVA who was in a union. In the past, he had been a member of the Juventude Comunista Portuguesa (Portuguese Communist Youth) and more recently had becomee involved with a leftist political platform, Bloco de Esquerda (Left Bloc). Victor was studying chemical engineering at university when a severe conflict with his parents made him leave home. Confronted with having to support himself Victor began looking for a job. Before working at EVA he spent two-​and-​a-​half years at another call centre. Before that, when he was beginning his studies, he had worked for a publishing company during the summer, doing clerical tasks. He tried to balance his studies and working full-​time at the call centre, but after a while he decided to give up university because he had no time left for anything else in his life. [Before you went to work at the call centre, did you know what the job entailed? Did you have friends already working at call centres?] I already knew some people who had been working at other call centres. But I went to work at that one without knowing anyone; I left my parents’ house in the middle of an argument and I had to manage. I was finishing my degree, started to look for a job and trying to manage … What I had in mind was to find a job that would give me a wage I could live on decently for a while. I think this is the way everyone starts. That story of finding a temporary job, staying there for a while, –​but then you get used to it … It was relatively easy for me because I knew a bit about computing.

Because of his unusually keen political awareness, I began by asking him to define the uniqueness of call centre work. [Is there anything specific to call centre work compared with other kinds of jobs?] Maybe … In fact … usually you have very tiring tasks that don’t demand much imagination, and these kinds of tasks tend to isolate you from the rest of your life. After I started working at ONI [the previous call centre] I stopped any political activity; I  couldn’t manage both because I  used to arrive home very tired from work … After spending so many hours locked inside a small space the last thing I wanted was to go to political meetings that could last for entire nights! My sanity cannot take that. I need to do other kinds of things, with other goals. [Do you think people who don’t work at call centres have any idea of what goes on?]

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Actually, it is funny that you ask that because in my close circle of friends most of them are from the left, but among them I am the only one who has had any direct involvement with union activity. It’s funny because usually they have a very interesting theoretical discourse, but then people who are in the labour market don’t have a work situation that enables them to have that kind of discourse … No, people have no idea about call centre work … Not the work done, the pressure, the productivity demanded of workers or the environment that is sometimes created … You must have noticed that people are being treated inhumanely at call centres. There are different ways of talking to people, and sometimes some people don’t realise that they are talking to human beings … Maybe it’s due to the tension that exists; it’s impossible to have 400 people shut up in one room and not have tensions among them. [What do you think generates that inhumane treatment towards each other?] To start with it’s because of the physical limitation of the space –​the physical environment induces people to enter into stressful situations. It’s a closed environment. The call centre is a closed environment in which you are face-​to-​face with a computer monitor, with a kind of light which is not the most adequate, in a hot environment –​the air you breathe is heavy, it’s air that’s already been breathed by someone else. All your time is controlled from the moment you begin until you finish your work: you have one button to go to the bathroom, you have another button to take a break … You can’t afford to arrive at work and do what some people do: ‘Today I arrived at work tired so let me take a coffee first and then I’ll start work’ … All of this generates exhaustion, and a great amount of tension as well as frustration among workers. It generates frustration because if you don’t feel good about yourself, you inevitably behave badly towards others –​not only in front of other people but also in the mirror. […] [But what is ‘the machine’?] For me the machine is the structure of the call centre. Team leaders, procedures –​wait, maybe I am not explaining myself … Everything that pressures you in terms of the company, that pressures you in terms of procedures, that tells you what to do … you are a bit like a cog in a machine. If it breaks, they take the broken part and put in another one. Another person is put in the same job who will do the same function. In a call centre you substitute any person at any time.

Victor’s comment ‘if you don’t feel good about yourself, you inevitably behave badly towards others –​not only in front of other people but also in the mirror’ always seemed to me to be very illustrative of how shame is expressed without being directly mentioned. Not behaving well in front of the mirror means being ashamed of oneself, not being able to recognise oneself in what one sees through the eyes of others. When they are dependent on the only source of income available workers have to bear being only a ‘cog in a machine’. The shame of being a disposable worker is not overt, but it is implicit in the many stories workers shared with me. While I was taking a cigarette break with one of the team leaders, José (28), who had previously also been an operator, we talked for a while about the possibility of buying a flat. Doing so is, for the generation currently working at call centres, seen as the first step towards gaining some independence from the family. The previous

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weekend, José had been searching for a flat to buy with his partner. He compared his chance of doing this on a TWA contract with the opportunities his father had had. His father had worked for thirty years as a locksmith for a ship-​repair and -​building company called Lisnave. Although, José said, he now received a ‘miserable’ State pension, he had been able to buy a house and have a family. His father was the only member of the family who had ‘brought money home’ as José said. Furthermore, his father had had pride in the work he did at Lisnave. According to José, it gave him a sense of belonging to a cohesive group of workers whose functions demanded unique and complementary skills of each of them. This comparison is particularly important because it addresses what I consider to be an essential part of the social matrix of shame that call centre workers feel towards their families. Besides having greater security in his employment, José’s father had specific skills that were not easily replaceable. That is why he stayed in the company for thirty years. Call centre workers do not have or learn specific skills. Indeed, the recruitment system is designed to ensure disposability as an essential strategy of labour control. The internalisation of being a ‘disposable worker’, or ‘a cog in a machine’, is one of the most critical sources of shame in the private realm of family life. The vast majority of the operators interviewed still live with their parents. This lack of autonomy and independence was frequently illustrated by the interviewees when they referred to the impossibility of reciprocating the financial and educational investment made in them by their parents in the same way that their parents had with their grandparents. In other words, call centre operators feel dispossessed of the means –​or the capacity to project having them in the future –​to pay back this kinship debt by providing their parents with financial support in old age in case of need, or of assuring the moral and physical continuation of the family through marriage and children. This is particularly pressing in Portugal because of the resilience of a ‘welfare society’ that has served to mitigate the deficiencies of a late-​developing and inefficient welfare state. Newman (1988: 127) argues that although within certain family relationships in industrial societies the rule of reciprocity in material exchange may not be applicable, there is, among downwardly mobile individuals, a sense of exposure to support from family that heightens the feelings of obligation and loss of status. This was particularly so among my informants, for whom the lack of independence from their parents reminded them of their unrealised status as adult workers and consumers. Sources of stigma and bodily injuries In this section, I  explore how workers describe and justify the public stigma attached to call centre work, and the primary forms this public stigma takes in the daily transactions within and beyond the workplace.5 Call centre workers are seen by others as having acquired through their work a set of discredited attributes that diminish them, implying inferiority, and these are taken to be synonymous with the person as a whole.6 In the operator’ daily work, it is the clients with whom they have the most contact. It is primarily through their callers’ comments and

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insinuations that workers perceive how others see them. Operators sometimes mentioned the absence of physical co-​location as a reason for clients’ harshness. One worker said that not seeing the person leads clients to be less cautious with the language they use, while the fact that sometimes operators are obliged to follow a script during the call leads clients to think that they can act as if they were talking to a machine. [Do you think clients respect the work of call centre operators?] I don’t think so … I think there is a stigma … I think call centre work is taken as ‘insignificant work’ … even my father when he is referring to my work calls it ‘insignificant work’ … people see it as a hobby … so, there is a stigma, yes … It’s the kind of work associated with young people who work part-​time … although that is not always the case, but people think we are mostly young people … Even clients have that idea –​we try always to be professional, but clients have that preconceived idea when they talk with us. But not only clients –​I think it’s an idea that’s already rooted in society, in the way people deal with us. [But people who work at call centres are different a lot from each other.] Exactly, it’s the contrary. In other words, most of the people who work at call centres are looking only for a part-​time job to make some money. But there are a great many older people, with children, who need this job full-​time to carry on their lives … There’s something I’m quite sure of now: we are nothing to them. I don’t know how to explain to you, but they think that what we do is not work.

Call centre work is not considered ‘proper work’. It is understood to have certain characteristics –​repetition, lack of creativity, monotony –​that impinge on one’s character, leading people to consider call centre workers as uninteresting, robotic and dull. It is with this stereotype that call centre operators have to contend every day, in every call –​inside the workplace as well as outside it. This is also one of the reasons people say they work at firm X but not that they are working in a call centre. Workers are aware of the meanings attached to this specific workplace, and their ‘impression management’ (Goffman 1969 [1959]) is anchored in a partial strategy of silence. By this, I do not mean to say that workers do not talk to each other about what they do; they talk a lot among themselves. Lunchtime is mostly filled with talk and jokes about a certain situation with a certain client. I mean that outside the workplace one cannot talk about one’s profession with pride. They do not have the pride of those in a craft or profession that affords them a collective identity with which they can build bridges of identification and safety, like José’s father. The feelings of being stigmatised arose because in their daily lives workers have to face the separation between themselves and the ‘normal’ ones. This is sometimes revealed in quite common situations. Manuel (25), while talking about temporary employment, placed his situation in a global context, repeating several times that ‘all there is now is temporary work agencies … they are everywhere’. He then described an episode he had recently experienced. He wanted to buy quite an expensive mobile phone, and he wanted to pay for it on credit. The shop he went to told him that because his employment contract was with a TWA, they were not able to consider offering him credit. The inability to do something so prosaic and

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‘normal’ as paying for a mobile phone in instalments was seen as a moment of stigmatisation by this worker. He later told me how unfair the situation was, as if being a temporary worker meant being a second-​class citizen, not only in this situation but also in other areas of life. There is a constant tendency in call centres to reduce operators to the status of children. The infantilising rhetoric legitimates control and vigilance. Besides the ordinary and everyday contact among operators, team leaders and team coordinators, the monthly evaluation illustrates this tendency. Team leaders are in charge of carrying out three evaluations per month of each of their team members, while the team coordinator has to listen to and evaluate each operator’s calls. As an internal worker, the team coordinator reflects and reproduces a specific discourse that reinforces the stigmatisation of call centre operators as children. While I was observing the team coordinator evaluate calls it was quite common to hear them make disparaging remarks about the operators. Before almost every evaluation the coordinator would comment ‘Vamos lá ver como é que este se safa!’ (‘Let’s see how he gets away with it!’). According to the coordinator operators ‘safam-​se’, ‘desenrascam-​se’ and ‘desembaraçam-​se’; they do not work in a basically productive or efficient way.7 These common expressions justify the policing attitude of the team leaders, who are instructed to ‘apertar com os gajos’ (to ‘put pressure on the guys’) in order to assure that operators –​‘os gajos’8 –​ behave like productive adults or efficient cogs in a machine. Reprimanding the operators further infantilises them, leading to a direct comparison with school. At one such moments José, one of the team leaders, summoned a recently hired operator to instruct him on how he should work, as he had made many mistakes on his first day. José’s tone of voice was professorial rather than aggressive. He advised the operator that when people are at school the pupils should take notes on the study materials, and only pupils who apply themselves get good results. He ended his reprimand by stating that ‘I cannot do your work for you; I have already given you all the advice I can so that you can organise your work better. Now you are the one who has to prove that you can achieve the targets you need to keep working here.’ The threat of dismissal is always the subtext in instructions for ‘good and productive work’. The sources of stigma I have described have implications for workers’ lives and health. Jorge’s narrative is particularly illustrative in this respect. Jorge (32) had worked in several call centres. Originally from Lisbon, he left home at 18 and moved to the northern part of Portugal to a city called Bragança. He was accepted at the state university to study forest engineering. For the first two years he had a scholarship, but it was then annulled because he did not manage to pass to enter the third year. He returned to Lisbon, and between 1996 and 2001 he had several jobs: for Pizza Hut making home deliveries, as a security guard in a bank, in a bar serving drinks at night and as a catering assistant. During these years he decided to get back to night-​time study, and undertook professional training in the insurance sector. In 2001 he decided to apply for a job at an insurance company call centre, having learnt of the vacancy through a friend who was working there. He was offered and accepted the position, and started by giving telephone assistance

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to clients involved in accidents. During the seven years he worked there he was made a series of false promises regarding the possibility of becoming a permanent worker. This never happened.9 The aspects most emphasised by Jorge were the consequences of living in a state of constant uncertainty about his employment, and the emotional and physical stress attached to the job. It is very distressing to be working in a place thinking, is it next month that they will send me away? Is it next year that I’ll be out of a job? Can I have a child one day? Will I have money to pay the rent next month? … We don’t have conditions to have a life. Patrícia … Because it is one thing if you are working with security, you can plan your life … for example, in my case, right now I am unemployed. My partner is a civil servant but she has been working on contracts too; she has a college degree, and she says to me ‘Imagine if I become unemployed too?’.

Jorge did call centre work for seven years, which might be considered a record. Out of all the people I interviewed Jorge had been working in a call centre for the most extended continuous period. Several studies promoted by private companies indicate that the average turnover of call centre operators is around two years because of the stress of the job. The majority of the interviewees had been working for a continuous period in one call centre between one month and two years. Jorge described the emotional and physical stress of the job: Once I arrived home with pain in my hands, from typing on the computer keyboard … It is not only one or two people; I  know dozens of persons that are in that situation –​they go to the psychologist, the only thing he can do is prescribe tranquillisers, and then these people are at work, some of them looking like zombies. They are very calm, almost falling asleep … and I am talking about people who are less than 30 years old! Because more than 90 per cent of calls are complaints, people are angry: they had an accident or something like that. We deal with all kinds of people: some people don’t have any patience, some don’t know how to talk, some are very rude … you get everything in there, people swearing at you, insulting you … I know that people don’t beat you, but the psychological part … listening day after day to people insulting you on the phone, every day. The number of people that I saw breaking down crying.

He brought the stress home from work: I don’t know –​now I take one day at a time, but I honestly don’t know … I am very nervous; that’s the reason I always practised sport, did martial arts –​it was my escape. Maybe there were people who took out the anger on their partners; I can tell you that I had arguments with my partner because of that. You get home with all that stress and then for the most minimal thing you explode, and it’s not the other person’s fault. I used to scream, then I apologised because I knew that it was because of my stress; my partner understood … you try to let go of work but you can’t.

The aspects referred to by Jorge seem to me to be of the utmost importance because they illustrate how the feelings of stigma acquire physical and semi-​permanent

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expression (‘you try to let go of work but you can’t’). The bodily injuries caused by call centre work are an integral part of feeling that one is carrying a stigma. The pain in the hands due to excessive typing, high levels of stress, depressive symptoms and the development of chronic otitis externa were reported to me by several operators.10 These factors remind the workers that they are not like the ‘normal’ ones, who supposedly have a greater degree of autonomy over their bodies and fewer limitations than call centre operators. Furthermore, a large part of what we are comes from what our bodies say about us; and sometimes what our bodies say about us is deeply stigmatising. Another operator, Helena (30), who had worked at an insurance call centre for five years, said: I learnt a lot over those five years –​I can’t say that I haven’t learned anything –​ but it is a very difficult profession; it simply broke both my hearing and my vocal system. After five years working as a call centre operator I was physically debilitated. I went to the ear doctor and he told me that the maximum someone should work in a call centre is three years, and I had worked double that! … At home my parents started to notice that I always put the volume of the television up too high. Besides that my mother started to notice that I  was always very ‘wired’, because in call centre work you need speed, more speed, more speed … When I was eating or talking about something I sounded too wired. My parents started to notice that. And when it came to my hearing, I kept repeating ‘Sorry?’, ‘What did you say?’. I was constantly doing that.

Emily Martin (1992, 1997) has investigated the relations between the emergence of a new model of body and person and practices of flexibility in late capitalist economies. One of her main findings suggests that the use of flexibility in the corporate world also serves as a metaphor for the imposition of a notion of person and body that can continuously change and adapt to new circumstances and challenges. In the same vein, call centre operators are expected to be ‘flexible’ and ‘adaptable’ enough in order not to feel and internalise the emotional and bodily demands of the job. Such an imposition is, however, a source of stigma: workers feel as if they cannot control their individuality as it is expressed in the bodily injuries caused by the work, particularly in confrontation with others. Jorge mentioned the difficulty of avoiding arguments with his partner caused by the accumulated stress at work, and Helena described how her parents started to notice something different in her behaviour when she started to lose her hearing and was always ‘wired’. The testimonies of both Jorge and Helena are representative of what other operators confided in me:  that the social stigma of call centre work is inscribed on their bodies and selves and acts as a social differentiator in their relationships with the ‘others’ –​ the supposedly ‘normal’. Conclusion In this chapter, I have given prominence to the workers’ narratives of their sense of dispossession, relegation and stigma, while at the same time establishing links between these ‘structures of feeling’ (Williams 1977) and the historically grounded

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social frames of generation, class and kin/​family relationships. Throughout their trajectories, call centre workers were exposed, on the one hand, to a rhetoric of middle-​class distinction associated with stable employment and higher educational achievement and, on the other, to the increased flexibility of employment relations, intensified after Portugal joined the EU. I have addressed two of the main responses to entrapment between these conflicting discourses as related by my interviewees: resentment and frustration. I have also addressed how these feelings are linked to the social expectations of upward mobility they inherited, and the frustration that resulted from their generation’s failure to fulfil them. Throughout this chapter, the short biographical notes about the workers and the interview excerpts show the repetition of certain social anxieties, the most prominent of which are the impact of call centre labour on the realm of interpersonal friendships, and the management of shame in the private realm of the nuclear family. Workers emphasised how call centre labour affects their expressive abilities to engage linguistically and relationally with others outside work. In the private sphere, the feeling of shame within their close family was often articulated through their parents’ remarks that call centre work is ‘not really a proper job’. Operators confront these remarks with difficulty and shame, not least because they tend to compare their own trajectories with those of their parents. Shame concerning their work is aroused through this comparison, and this reveals the extent to which call centre work degrades human abilities and skills. The management of feelings of shame is all the more difficult because of the public stigmatisation of call centre work as dull, robotic and repetitive, and of course, it is a devalued form of work with precarious employment conditions. In everyday life, workers have to deal with situations that lead to low self-​esteem and lack of self-​respect stemming from the limitations of being employed on a temporary basis. They experience high levels of emotional and physical stress, which, in an extreme form, might lead to semi-​permanent health injuries, such as depression or otitis externa. Erving Goffman reports that originally the carrier of a stigma bore a specific identifying bodily mark that distinguished them (Goffman 1990). The health problems due to call centre work do not have the visibility of such bodily marks but, for the workers, they are as profoundly discrediting of their sense of self. They represent the most concrete and tangible form of dispossession. Notes 1 This chapter is based on forty semi-​structured interviews with operators at EVA, all of them temporary workers. I had more than one interview with the majority, each one lasting between two and four hours. In the technical call centre, where I undertook my fieldwork, most workers were men and one out of fifty-​two was affiliated with a union. In order to go beyond this limitation, I also interviewed workers I was put in touch with by the unions that participated in the research. 2 This is contrary to A. R. Vasavi’s claim that ‘the ITES [Information Technology Enabled Services] workforce in India is predominantly young, and unlike call centre workers in

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the West which consists of mixed age groups and relatively less educated persons, the Indian workforce consists largely of college graduates’ (Vasavi 2008:  216). Moreover, according to Holman et al. (2007: 12) most call centres hire people with at least a complete secondary education, and it is interesting to note that, after India, the country that relies most heavily on a labour force with at least two years’ university-​level education is France. 3 In Europe, call centre work emerges as a representative example of the interplay between knowledge work and the increased social polarisation of class relations  –​leading to the ‘shrinking of the middle classes’ (Sassen 1998:  46) as well as to the effects of the economic and political neoliberal project in dismantling protected labour regimes and the spread of precarious employment arrangements (Bourdieu 1998; Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; Gledhill 2004; Harvey 2005; Ong 2006). 4 My reasoning on the relations between the temporal experience of dispossession and class is influenced by Pierre Bourdieu, who analysed the relations among time, power and domination. According to Bourdieu, dispossession is experienced on two axes: subjective expectations and real chances. Alongside these two axes the sense of dispossession is realised through three main mechanisms: (1) the fear of redundancy; (2) the act of waiting, which detaches the individual from the historical and social context that creates time in itself, and could therefore be designated ‘alienated time’; and (3)  the sense of justification in one’s existence that comes from the recognition of others, is derived first of all from social relationships –​the social fields crossed by individuals on their life trajectories (Bourdieu 2000: 216–​28). 5 I am broadly following Erving Goffman’s definition of stigma as a ‘social discrepancy between virtual and actual social identity’ (1990 [1963]: 12). As such, it presupposes (a)  a relation between attribute and stereotype, (b)  a separation between stigmatised and ‘normals’, and (c) the consideration that the one who carries a stigma ‘is not quite human’. 6 This is not particular to the Portuguese context. Popular representations of call centre workers are prominently negative. One of the most disseminated epithets of operators in India is ‘cyber-​collies’, intended to designate the downgraded and subservient worker in IT sweatshops (see, for instance, Patel 2010: 41; Nadeem 2011: 58). In 2005, in the UK, an insurance company television advert depicted call centre workers as chickens. A British call centre employers’ association tried to take legal action against the advertisement in order to have it banned from the UK TV screens but lost the case. The advert can still be seen at www.youtube.com/​watch?v=GEN8rP0ePOA (accessed February 2020). 7 These three verbs are not easily translated to English; they have similar meanings though. They are used in Portuguese when people are trying to ‘pull through’ or ‘get over’ some difficult task they were instructed to do. 8 The closest translation for this word in English would be ‘guys’. It is a slang word usually used as the antonym of ‘Sir’ or ‘Mister’. 9 Although he told me about what happened during those seven years he asked me not to write about it because the case was still in court. Consequently, the interview extracts I use here are mostly concerned with his views on call centre work and the conditions of employment, particularly regarding how it affected his life and way of being in the world. 10 Otitis externa is inflammation of the outer ear, or ear canal, often known as ‘swimmer’s ear’.

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Conclusion

In 2019 the Portuguese Parliament asked the Government to put an end to what the media had recently been defining as the ‘faroeste do atendimento’ (‘Wild West of call centres’ (Câncio 2019). The metaphor of call centres as the ‘Wild West’ –​a place without rules or regulations –​was used to designate a working sector lacking legal professional recognition, with the virtual absence of any form of collective regulation of working conditions, and employment contractual practices verging on illegality.1 Parliament’s request led the Government to compromise by creating a commission to oversee an extensive study of working conditions in the call centre sector. This study will focus on the physical and psychological well-​ being of workers, the way work is organised, health conditions, safety regulations and employment practices. In contrast to other political parties on the left (the PCP and the Left Bloc), the socialist Government did not suggest the immediate implementation of a set of collective regulations to address irregularities long made public by activists, unions and the media –​in spite of signalling during the parliamentary debate the existence of ‘cases of modern slavery’ in the sector. The Government’s commitment to lead an inquiry into working conditions months before an upcoming general election (due to take place in October 2019) was politically instrumental in reinforcing the struggle against precarity as a fundamental centrepiece of the Socialist Party’s political campaign. After decades of continuous growth and media attention, some recent developments have consistently focused public and political attention on the sector, which has remained the main symbol of neoliberal precarity. In 2014, the Sindicato dos Trabalhadores de Call Centers (Call Centre Workers’ Trade Union; STCC), independent from the two major trade union confederations, was created. Since its creation, the STCC has organised and promoted public encounters with activists, workers and researchers. The aim is to denounce how those working in call centres experience intensive forms of employment precarity, health problems, moral harassment practices, undignified working conditions and low wages. In 2015, the STCC launched a public petition asking Parliament to designate call centre work a profissão de desgaste rápido (a high-​risk or high-​stress job), to be recognised by the Standard Classification of Occupations.2 Additionally, the petition called for a reduction in the time spent by operators on the phone with

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clients and for the implementation of more frequent task rotation.3 In 2016, the STCC handed the petition to Parliament with 5,500 signatures. It was debated in 2019, resulting in the Socialist Party’s recommendation to conduct the aforementioned study. The Socialist Party report stated that ‘the business volume (of the call centre sector) has tripled between 2016 and 2017, having reached €300 million, while the average wage has decreased by €23.’4 The report also noted ‘a high incidence of short-​term employment contracts in the sector –​twice bigger than in the economy as a whole’.5 Despite having only 600 affiliated members in 2019 (in a sector estimated to employ more than 80,000 people), the initiatives of the STCC, including the petition, helped keep the theme of call centre working conditions and employment practices on the public agenda. The increasing number of people for whom work in the call centre sector has become a ‘permanent precarious condition’ is another recent development helping to keeping media attention directed towards working conditions in the sector. For a growing number of people, call centre work has lasted longer than initially expected because of the lack of other job opportunities suited to their qualifications and/​or professional training. Moreover, while the dominant profile of the call centre operator is young and educated, with either complete secondary education or with a university degree,6 as a consequence of the high rates of unemployment caused by the 2008 financial crisis and ensuing austerity policies, the sector has become the only job option for other sectors of the population, including older men and women, deemed too old to find a job in their area of expertise and too young to retire. For employers’ associations and multinationals specialising in call and contact centres based in Portugal, one of the strategies used to overcome the growing critical voices denouncing corrupt working practices in the sector has been to invest in the creation of big, multilingual call centres. These outfits aim to attract young and qualified manpower from other countries (particularly from Northern Europe) by advertising Portugal as a country with ‘good food and good weather’, ideally suited for a summer work experience. Generally, workers receive less than they would in their native countries, but more than what is paid to those working for the national market. For instance, the company Teleperformance promotes a six-​month programme it calls ‘Atlantic Experience’.7 The firm offers institutional support in assembling the required official documentation, and provides an accommodation allowance and wages amounting to about €1000 euros month for recent international graduates coming to Portugal (Neves 2018). In the first two decades of the twenty-​first century, the public and political shared representation of call centres as the main symbol of labour precarity has remained relatively unchanged, despite shifting political–​economic conjunctures. The social and political actors intervening in the contested status of call centres as the main icon of precarity have expanded, struggles of collective representation and organisation have increased, and the workforce typology has become more varied. Nonetheless, call centre work is still perceived the same way by most people and experienced thus by those working in the sector. It is recurrently portrayed as such in the media, with titles alluding directly to a profound sense of

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disenchantment and resentment, such as ‘O call centre deu-​me cabo da vida’ (‘The call centre has fucked my life’), or ‘onde os sonhos vão morrer’ (‘[The call centre is the place] where dreams go to die’).8 While it is still uncertain how recent forms of collective organisation and mobilisation in the sector may develop in the future, they are illustrative of how call centres remain a significant emblem of precarity in Portugal, mobilised and deployed by distinct conjuncture interests to intervene in and shape the politics of precarity. Throughout this book, I have posited that the work process of the Portuguese call centre is best defined as a regime of disciplined agency. The notion of disciplined agency aims to capture how the practices of recruitment and training, employment conditions, work organisation and an architecture of value-​extraction are mediated by historical and morally contingent dimensions of neoliberal precarity and the dispossession of a generation. In Portugal’s historical reality, precarisation has been an integral part of State projects of accumulation and development, aiming to facilitate the accommodation of external requirements of incorporation within broader capitalist patterns. The State has mobilised collective, commonsense worldviews and grammars of identity (such as necessity, freedom, modernity) as ideological instruments of political legitimation, while incorporating people’s life goals into shifting regimes of accumulation. Intra-​generational life goals that aim towards middle-​class distinction have stabilised exploitative processes tied to the structural continuities of labour precarisation through its dislocation across time and structures of feeling. A deeply ingrained tradition of labour devaluation and the constancy of a strong interventionist State, across distinct political regimes, has facilitated the emergence and expansion of precarious employment frameworks in the call centre sector. In a national context shaped by a strong social memory of cumulative layers of inequality and dispossession, people’s orientation towards the future, and across generations, has constituted perhaps the most realistic way of making the present bearable, while envisioning alternative life horizons. In Portugal, people’s longing for a better life for themselves and the next generation expresses the power exerted by hegemonic State projects of accumulation and regulation, as well as their unfinished and contested character, across generations and scales. The ways the meanings of precarity in contemporary Portugal are tied to unfulfilled intra-​ generational aspirations to middle-​ class distinction indicate how precarious class subjectivities emerge through the dialectics of dominant wage regimes and normative life paths:  the ongoing tension between the imperative to make a living and the need to have a life worth living (Naroztky and Besnier 2014; Denning 2010). The breakdown of an intra-​generational reproductive moral economy of ‘worthy living’, embedded in the recent history of the country, informs call centre operators’ experience of precarity. Their narratives regarding what they do, and how they feel about what they do, are underpinned by moral sentiments they share with other members of their generational cohort engaged in low-​paid, casual and unprestigious service work –​and this resonates with the phenomenon of the ‘lost generation’ in various European contexts, as well as the ‘debt generation’ in the USA. I use the notion of moral sentiments to signify that operators’ feelings

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of resentment, shame (in the private realm of the family) and stigma (in the public sphere) are not only an emotional, subjective or affective reaction to frustrating lives and working conditions. Their moral sentiments point to the breakdown of a lay normativity (Sayer 2011), linking notions of personal value, moral worth and class status to a particular conception of ‘a good life’ or ‘worthy living’, grounded on a trajectory towards middle-​class distinction. The notion of disciplined agency, though empirically grounded on the Portuguese context, aims to contribute to a broader moral critique of precarity focused on scrutinising the links between the historical development of precarious neoliberal service regimes and context-​bound processes of moral dispossession. In distinct national contexts, particularly in Southern and Central Europe, the absorption of highly educated youngsters into the call centre sector is experienced as a ‘falling from grace’ –​that breakdown of the historically embedded expectations of continuous life improvement across generations. Educated youngsters engaged in unprotected, undervalued and poorly paid service labour experience neoliberal precarity through their immediate material and social effects (income insecurity, lack of citizenship rights, inability to be financially autonomous and independent, employment vulnerability), and as a form of moral betrayal, expropriation and dispossession. These young people, like those whose voices have been heard throughout this book, experience neoliberal precarity in the sector as being deprived of a horizon of social value, worth, entitlement and status built into the ruthless material exploitative conditions of their employment contracts, work activities and telephone interactions. The effects of this generation’s moral dispossession –​in the form of resentment, shame and/​or stigma –​indicate how capitalist contradictions become integral to, or displaced into, the intimate realm of aspirations, expectations, longings and desires. The relevance of attending to the various forms of moral dispossession experienced by distinctly positioned precarious labour forces consists precisely in enhancing a critique of precarity across national contexts that cannot be reduced to the effects of structural, systemic or global shifts in labour and employment conditions. A  critical comparative analysis of the phenomenon of neoliberal precarity is widened by jointly addressing its material and moral dimensions. Approaching neoliberal precarity through a material and moral lens enables us to illuminate the sometimes ambivalent and contradictory effects arising from the interaction among capitalist global systemic shifts; specific national histories; and the contingent, relational meaning-​making frameworks through which people make sense of, evaluate and define what precarity is and what its causes are. Throughout this book, the feelings of worthlessness related by operators have been a poignant reminder of how the capitalist commodification of workers’ infinite labour-​power potential is parallel to their devaluation as worthy social agents. Operators’ feelings of relegation, shame and stigma are the most salient expression of how a particular national history of capitalist development becomes embedded in the trajectories of a casualised workforce. Moreover, the for-​profit valuation purposes of call centre operators’ agentive capabilities are in inverted relationship with the devaluation they experience as kin, citizens and consumers.

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The inherent contradiction between standardisation and singularisation in service labour powerfully shapes the nature of value-​creation within call centres. As we have seen, this contradiction lies in the systemic tension between quality and quantity. Keeping this contradiction going facilitates management’s appropriation of linguistic agency. As I have outlined, operators bring their linguistic agentive capacities of improvisation, creativity and decision-​making to bear upon the institutionalised quality–​quantity conundrum, and must balance the tensions and ambivalences arising from their interactions with callers. Historical, moral and relational contingent features, built into the call centre’s organisatinal structures, facilitate and mediate the regulation of agentive linguistic capabilities. The moral economy of labourer production within the Portuguese call centre sector, positions, evaluates and envisions the workers as potential containers of subordination and agency. Such duality draws upon the moral ambivalence between precarity and valued agentive capabilities (such as the ability to speak foreign languages, the exercise of judgement in unforeseen situations, emotional rapport, self-​control, decision-​making). The role of the client, shaping the way labour as a service is mobilised, is mediated by the intersection of an organisational, ideological prescription of the client’s sovereignty and a particular moral economy of the expectations of this generation of workers. This intersection determines how the figure of the ‘sovereign client’ comes to be accommodated or contested by operators, as manifested in the way they navigate the tension between a ‘robotic’ or a ‘creative’ working persona. The notion of disciplined agency also problematises a relatively neglected dimension of the call centre work process: the role played by operators’ morally and socially embedded agentive linguistic capacities of decision-​making, problem-​ solving and ethical evaluation in value extraction. Earlier studies of the call centre labour process extensively debated the unprecedented level of expansion in the application of Taylorist methods of labour control with the aid of new technologies of information (Taylor and Bain 1999; Bain and Taylor 2000; Taylor et al. 2002). More recent studies emphasise how value extraction in call centres depends ultimately and crucially on the homogenisation, standardisation and decontextualisation of human linguistic and communicative capabilities (Lloyd 2013; Aneesh 2015; Brophy 2017; Woodcock 2017). The notion of disciplined agency does not aim to dispute the highly developed and invasive methods of labour control and surveillance in the work process made possible by computer technologies. Rather, it aims to contribute to expanding current approaches to value extraction and subjectification in call centre work by jointly focusing on the alienable and inalienable properties that make a particular form of labour-​power exploitable in an embedded historical, moral and relational reality. I have argued that the distinctive features of the architecture of value extraction in the labour process derive both from structural dimensions of work organisation, similar to those in call centres elsewhere, and from specific historical developments pertaining to the emergence of flexible capitalism in the country and the breakdown of intra-​generational expectations of social reproduction.

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The concept of disciplined agency aims, therefore, to expand current theories of value extraction within call centres from the standpoint of the interplay between structured processes of exploitation and specific features pertaining to history, context and morally bound structures of relationality. This is a perspective that builds upon Marxist insights, critical feminist theory and moral-​economic approaches, thereby combining a structural analysis of the exploitative nature of the call centre labour process with an analysis of the historical, contextual and morally bound embedded dispositions of labour-​power that make it possible to be alienated in the first place. Limiting our approach to modalities of exploitation and value extraction within neoliberal service labour regimes to focus on the structural and systemic features of capitalist value extraction limits our capacity to capture, explain and understand how the former are operationalised, enacted and put to work within specific, historically bounded contexts and relational frameworks. Moreover, it provides a one-​dimensional perspective of the dialectical causes, effects and context-​dependent factors facilitating or preventing the successful extraction and realisation of value. The regime of disciplined agency in the Portuguese call centre shows how the foundational contradiction between quantity and quality aims to accomplish a double goal: to make workers accountable for their productivity and to ensure their agential intervention. As we have seen, this process is facilitated and enhanced by its embeddedness in specific features pertaining to history, context and morally bound structures of relationality. In Portugal, the call centre valorisation process is not ultimately determined by the neo-​Tayloristic separation between conception and execution, geared towards the maximisation of linguistic interactions between operators and clients more prone to standardisation and measurement. Rather, is determined by the appropriation and concealment of the role played by operators’ embedded qualities of linguistic agentive intervention in overcoming the quality–​ quantity conundrum and ensuring profitability. If operators sometimes seem to us robots instead of humans, it may well be because, as Marx (1990 [1867]) noted critically, long ago, perhaps the most perverse and enduring achievement of capitalism is to make us believe that the world consists of an ‘immense collection of commodities’ (125):  a distortion that prevents us from seeing the world as constituted by the multiple purposeful actions, investments and behaviours of embodied labourers, whose meaning and intentionality are defined by their relational standpoint vis-​à-​vis structures of exploitation and historically and morally embedded pursuits of being and becoming. The call centre regime of disciplined agency is, ultimately, an instantiation of the irreducible historicity and morality of the condition, experience and politics of neoliberal precarity. Too often theoretical and analytical models privilege the highlighting of the systemic, structural and transnational features of neoliberal precarity. These models have produced valuable insights into changing global patterns of accumulation, regimes of citizenship and emergent classed-​based collective political subjects (Harvey 1989, 2005; Castel 2002; Hardt and Negri 2000, 2005; Standing 2011, 2014). However, they also tend to conceal how situated

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histories and moral life-​frameworks shape neoliberal developments and emerging subjectivities within particular national contexts and labour regimes. In doing so, abstract explanatory models of neoliberal precarity limit the analytical purchase of the precarity terminology. Addressing neoliberal precarity as a historically and morally embedded reality does not mean downplaying systemic and structural features of capitalist accumulation and global modalities of labour mobilisation and deployment. Rather, it means asserting that neoliberal precarity does not occur in a vacuum; it is mediated by the intertwined mutual shaping of historical state economies, emerging moral-​laden subjectivities and particular labour regimes.9 A focus on the contingent nature of neoliberalism can also enhance the emancipatory possibilities of the precarity terminology. I have examined how, in Portugal, the relational and moral dimension of expectations across generations produces a politics of precarity in the call centre sector, torn between emancipatory possibilities and moral stigma. This ambivalence influences how the call centre employee may come to identify, or not, with the label of precarious worker, or as a member of a broader precariat encompassing workers from various economic sectors. Rather than defining a priori what the precariat is, or is not, this book emphasises the relevance of its historical and contextual character, which enables us to capture workers’ ambivalent reflective stance towards their situation. We can also define the limits of possible alliances among differentiated groups of precarious workers (such as migrant workers, highly skilled freelances, domestic staff and call centre operators). Simultaneously, bringing to light the differentially constitutive histories of those in conditions of labour precarity allows us to articulate and envisage an emancipatory political strategy based on shared commonalities and situated differences. In this way, we can understand more comprehensively how material and moral aspirations and expectations shape possible divergences, approximations and solidarities among different kinds of precarious workers. By introducing the notion of disciplined agency, grounded on the irreducible historicity and morality of neoliberal precarity, I aim to contribute to a broader framework of enquiry into the multiple realities of precarity and precarisation processes under neoliberal capitalism –​one that expands the integration, through analysis, of the material and ideological constraints determining people’s livelihoods and capabilities, while also attending to the ways in which they are deeply entangled in the moral framework of expectations, obligations and responsibilities across structures of kin, class and generation. In this way, the notion of disciplined agency directs our gaze towards the variable intersections between emerging forms of labour exploitation in service realms of production and the material and moral insecurities generated by capitalism under neoliberal governance. Notes 1 There are countries that have created specific working regulations for the call centre sector. For instance, in Italy and Brazil operators cannot be on the line with clients for more than six hours.

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2 In Portugal, a range of professional categories are defined as profissão de desgaste rápido according to a set of criteria, including pressure and stress, the emotional and physical fast-​wearing components of the job, and high-​risk working conditions. For instance, pilots, air-​traffic controllers, miners and dancers are considered to be profissões de desgaste rápido and are entitled to early-​retirement pension schemes. 3 The public petition is available at https://​peticaopublica.com/​pview.aspx?pi=PT74238 (accessed March 2020). 4 See Ribeiro (2019). The recommendation report of the Socialist Party can be read at www.parlamento.pt/​ActividadeParlamentar/​Paginas/​DetalheIniciativa.aspx?BID=43463 (accessed March 2020). 5 See www.publico.pt/​2019/​03/​15/​p olitica/​noticia/​p arlamento-​p ede-​governo-​regula mente-​trabalho-​call-​centersi-​1865592 (accessed March 2020). 6 A 2019 benchmarking report carried out by the APCC indicates that 95 per cent of operators are between 25 and 40 years of age; 58 per cent have completed secondary education and 37 per cent a university degree (APCC 2019). 7 See the video advert for the programme:  https://​youtu.be/​39CwBhp7k1w (accessed March 2020). 8 See https://​observador.pt/​especiais/​sindrome-​burnout-​call-​center-​deu-​me-​cabo-​da-​ vida/​ (accessed March 2020); https://​ionline.sapo.pt/​artigo/​492681/​onde-​os-​sonhos-​ vao-​morrer-​um-​m-​s-​num-​call-​center?seccao=Portugal (accessed March 2020); and Neves (2019). 9 The contributions to the volume edited by Hann and Parry (2018), which focuses on industrial settings of the capitalist periphery, dispute the emergence of a ‘neoliberal common sense’ determining the growing expansion of casualised labour forces. The authors emphasise instead how national State policies and context-​bounded understandings of class shape the accommodation or contestation of flexible labour regimes, as well as emerging neoliberal forms of personhood and consciousness.

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Index

500 euro generation 1, 38–​9, 43–​6, 51–​3, 54n6 ACD (automatic call distributor) 8, 20, 34n1, 98 activism 11, 26 see also anti-​capitalist/​globalisation social movements; Chainworkers; EuroMayday; precariat; San Precario agency 2, 5–​12, 18n11, 20, 56–​7, 73–​4, 76n12, 96–​7, 109–​13, 117, 126, 138–​42 see also commodification; exploitation; improvisation; value-​extraction algorithm 111–​12 Aneesh, A. 9, 19, 76n12, 93n1, 111–​12, 115, 140 anti-​capitalist/​globalisation social movements 39–​41 APCC (Associação Portuguesa de Contact Centers) 2, 54n2, 74n2, 97–​8, 113, 143n6 Armed Forces Movement 24 Associação Portuguesa de Contact Centers see APCC atypical forms of employment 29, 31–​2, 36n19 see also casualisation; temporary employment austerity 45–​6, 49–​52, 54n4, 55n12, 137 see also morality authority 12, 45, 67, 69–​70, 77–​81, 83, 93n1, 94n8, 108

see also clients; quantification; marketing automatic call distributor see ACD automatism 61–​3, 74, 109, 114 autonomy 10, 45, 57–​9, 66–​7, 84, 87, 129, 133 benchmarking 2, 97–​9 see also strategic management body 129–​33 see also stigma Bourdieu, P. 24, 63, 75n4, 75n10, 94n8, 120, 125, 135n4 see also dispossession Braverman, H. 8, 17n10, 18n11, 110, 113, 115n1 see also capitalist labour process; indeterminacy of labour power Brophy, E. 9, 17n7, 111–​12, 115, 140 Burawoy, M. 17n 10, 18n11 bureaucracy 57, 67–​70, 108 capitalism 4–​6, 8–​9, 11–​12, 20, 24, 27, 35n13, 40, 41, 140–​2 see also capitalist labour process; deskilling; flexibility; global capitalism; informal economy; State capitalist labour process 8, 17n10, 96–​7, 113–​15 see also labour process theory Carnation Revolution 24–​9 Castel, R. 4 casualisation 4, 31–​2, 40, 43, 49 Chainworkers 39–​40, 54n1

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Index class 2, 4–​6, 20–​4, 29–​34, 35n11, 38–​42, 53, 54n6, 117, 122–​5, 134, 135n3, 135n4, 138–​9 see also downward social mobility; embeddedness; entitlements; expectations; kin clients abuse 84–​9, 124, 129, 130, 132 authority 77–​8, 93n1 hierarchy 70–​3 recruitment 57–​9 sovereignty 12, 74, 78–​81, 140 teamwork 81–​3 see also gossip; humour; marketing; rumours; scripts code of conduct 99–​104, 113–​14 commodification 2, 4, 10, 11, 18n11, 20, 86, 97, 112–​15, 139–​41 computer telephony integration see CTI consciousness 8, 13 contact unit 67–​8, 70–​1, 78, 80, 84, 90–​1, 104 corporatism 21–​2, 27, 33 see also dictatorship coworkers 63–​7, 82 CTI (computer telephony integration) 8, 98 customer service 32, 79–​82, 98, 101, 103 depersonalisation 9, 65 see also Hochschild, A. deskilling 8, 112 developmental policies 24 dictatorship 20, 21–​4, 26–​7, 32–​4 discipline 7–​11, 12, 56–​8, 63–​5, 83–​4, 88–​9, 96–​7, 99–​104, 113–​14 dispossession 2, 11–​13, 21, 30–​3, 46, 53, 75n4, 84, 117, 124–​5, 133–​4, 135n4, 138–​9 docility 57–​9, 73, 115 downward social mobility 7, 38–​9, 117–​25 see also class; entitlements; expectations dysfunctions 67–​70 see also bureaucracy ECB (European Central Bank) 36n22, 36n23, 54n2

155 EEC (European Economic Community) 20, 26, 29–​32, 34, 34n3, 35n7 emancipation 38–​40, 52–​3 embeddedness 1–​2, 4–​7, 10, 14, 17n9, 18n11, 20–​1, 43, 46, 53–​7, 78, 84, 92–​3, 112–​13, 138–​42 emotional labour 16, 65, 84, 93n1 see also clients; Hochschild, A. emotions 56–​7, 65–​7, 73–​4, 77–​8, 86, 97, 103 employment contract 45–​7, 61, 82, 130, 136–​7 entitlements 11, 25, 27–​8, 51, 78, 83–​4, 92, 94n7, 122, 125, 139 ethnographic methods 13–​16 EU (European Union) 24, 29, 32, 34n3, 36n20, 36n22, 47, 54n4, 122, 134 EuroMayday 39–​44 European Central Bank see ECB European Economic Community see EEC European Union see EU expectations 6–​7, 11–​12, 20–​1, 31, 34, 38, 52–​3, 84, 94n7, 117–​25, 134, 135n4, 139, 140–​2 see also generation exploitation 10, 12, 20, 34n2, 75n4, 78, 83–​4, 86, 94n8, 97, 109–​13, 126, 141–​2 see also value-​extraction external workers 70–​3 family 125–​9 see also generation; kin; shame; stigma feminist theory 34, 34n2, 141 fieldwork 13–​16 flexibility 5, 32, 47–​8, 51–​3, 58–​9, 94n3, 122, 133–​4 see also casualisation; temporary employment Foucault, M. 59, 68, 115 freedom 6, 11, 24–​9, 31–​3, 61, 78, 83–​4, 120, 138 Freeman, C. 18n11, 62 friendship 60, 94n7, 134 frustration 45, 65, 117, 122–​5, 128, 134 future 5–​7, 23–​5, 28–​9, 31, 33, 55n12, 124–5, 129, 138 see also entitlements; expectations

156

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games 18n14, 60, 80, 101–​2 generation 1–​2, 4, 6–​7, 17n9, 20–​5, 27–​34, 35n14, 35n15, 78, 84, 92, 94n7, 117, 120–​5, 128, 134, 138–​42 see also 500 euro generation; intra-​ generational life goals global capitalism 4–​8, 19–​21, 32–​4, 35n13, 139–​42 gossip 89–​92 Harvey, D. 4, 33, 35n13, 37n25, 135n3, 141 hierarchy 57, 70–​4, 79–​80, 104 hiring 56–​9, 73–​4 see also coworkers; recruitment; skills; training Hochschild, A. 65, 77, 86, 93n1, 110 hope 6, 21–​4, 117–​25 humour 89–​92 ICT (information and communication technologies) 8, 55n10 ideology client 12, 78–​81, 92–​3, 112 neoliberal 4, 20 IEFP (Instituto de Emprego e Formação Profissional) 48 IMF (International Monetary Fund) 13, 27, 36n22, 54n4 immaterial labour 4–​5, 17n7, 40 see also Italian autonomist Marxists improvisation 109–​13 inbound 7 indeterminacy of labour power 8 India 10, 19–​20, 32, 43–​6, 55n17, 60, 76n12, 111, 124, 134n2, 135n6 see also transnational call centre sector industrial conditioning 21 see also corporatism; dictatorship industrialisation 21–​4 infantilisation 60, 131 informal economy 28, 42–​3 information and communication technologies see ICT Instituto de Emprego e Formação Profissional see IEFP interactive voice response see IVR internal workers 71–​2 International Monetary Fund see IMF

Index intra-​generational life goals 6, 20, 24–​5, 29, 33–​4, 117, 125, 138 Italian autonomist Marxists 4–​5 IVR (interactive voice response) 76n11, 83, 88, 98 job allocation 12, 56, 74 kin 2–​4, 6, 11, 17n9, 18n11, 20, 23–​4, 34, 36n18, 53, 94n7, 118, 120, 125–​9, 134, 138–​9, 142 labour control 18n11, 75n4, 109–​10, 115n1, 129, 140 devaluation 6–​7, 24–​5, 27–​8, 31–​4, 36n22, 46, 50–​2, 54n4, 138–​9 law 26, 28, 46–​9, 52 labour-​power 8–​10, 17n10, 22, 96, 112–​14, 116n14, 139–​41 labour process theory 8 language 2, 9–​10, 74, 75n10, 85, 96–​7, 109–​13, 126 see also value-​extraction livelihood 6–​7, 20, 23–​5, 28–​30, 33–​4, 35n14, 94n7, 125, 142 local area network 18n14 management 7–​8, 12, 19–​20, 48–​9, 57–​8, 60, 63, 65, 70–​1, 75n4, 77–​8, 81–​4, 88–​92, 93n1, 93n2, 103, 108–​14, 115n1, 140 see also strategic management marketing 77–​81 Marx, K. 8, 17n10, 34n2, 96, 113–​15, 141 measurement 99, 104–​8, 141 see also numbering; productivity; quantification media 43–​6 see also 500 euro generation middle-​class distinction 6, 11, 24, 38, 122, 134 Mirchandani, K. 8, 10, 76n12, 111 modernity 6, 29–​32, 35n15, 62, 124, 138 moral dispossession 11, 46, 53, 84, 124–​5, 139 moral economy 35n14, 57, 74, 76n12, 84, 125, 138, 140

157

Index morality 24, 49–​52, 141–​2

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necessity 21–​4 neoliberalism 4–​7, 25, 36n25, 40, 142 numbering 104–​9 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-​Operation and Development) 55n9 on-​the-​job training  65–​7 Organisation for Economic Co-​Operation and Development see OECD outbound 7 outsourcing 16n1, 20, 31–​2, 46, 68, 97–​9, 111

quality–​quantity conundrum 8–​10, 103–​4, 113, 115n1, 140–​1 quantification 104–​9 recruitment 57–​9, 73–​4 see also hiring; training relegation 133–​4, 139 resentment 83, 117–​25, 134, 138, 139 resistance 68, 84, 93n1, 115n1 rumours 89–​92

Panopticon 115, 115n1 parental generation 6–​7, 20, 23, 119–​20 Partido Social Democrata see PSD PCP (Portuguese Communist Party) 35n16, 51, 136 Polanyi, K. 17n9, 33 politicisation 46–​9 Portugal Telecom see PT Portuguese Communist Party see PCP positionality 13–​16 powerlessness 12, 59–​61, 73, 74n4 precariat 5, 38–​42 see also EuroMayday; San Precario precarious work 43, 45, 54n3 privatisation 26, 29–​30, 36n25 procedures 8–​9, 45, 57–​8, 66–​70, 73–​4, 80–1, 87, 110–​11, 128 productivity 12, 27, 31, 45, 60, 64, 97, 99, 102, 104, 114, 128, 141 reports 105–​6 professional 10, 61–​4, 72, 74, 82–​3, 87, 90, 99–​102, 112, 123, 130–​1, 136–​7, 143n2 professionalism 10, 72, 74, 99, 102 profitability 10, 12, 20, 22, 96–​7, 99, 104, 114, 116n14, 139, 141 proletarianisation 5, 8, 24, 112 PSD (Partido Social Democrata) 30 PT (Portugal Telecom) 44, 45, 48

San Precario 39–​43 scientific management 8 scripts 9, 67, 94n8, 110–​11 self-​discipline  99–​104 semi-​proletarianization  22 service level 83, 94n6, 98, 101–​2 service level agreement see SLA shame 117, 120, 125–​9 ‘side-​by-​side’  65 Sindicato dos Trabalhadores de Call Centers see STCC skills 10–​11, 46, 57–​9, 73–​4, 76n12, 129, 134 SLA (service level agreement) 98, 102, 113 software applications 59, 61–​2, 69, 84, 103–​4 sovereign client 67–​9, 81–​3, 93n2, 140 Standing, G. 4–​5, 39, 42, 53 State 6–​7, 20–​2, 28–​9, 32–​4, 36n25, 138–​42 status 5, 7, 20, 23–​4, 29–​30, 33–​4, 83–​4, 129, 131, 139 STCC (Sindicato dos Trabalhadores de Call Centers) 136–​7 stigma 38–​9, 52–​3, 117, 125–​33, 135n5, 139, 142 see also body strategic management 97–​9, 113, 115n4 structures of feeling 7, 17n9, 53, 133–​4, 142 struggle 49–​52, 136–​7 subjectivities 56–​7, 117–​18, 138–​42 subordination 56–​7, 73–​4, 76n12 surveillance 96–​7, 104–​9 see also numbering; productivity; quantification

qualitative evaluations 9, 60, 64, 99–​104, 116n9, 131

targets 8–​10, 59–​61, 96–​7, 103–​4, 113–​15 Taylor, F. 8

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158 ‘team spirit’ 59–​61 team values 77, 78, 82 teamwork 81–​3 temporary employment 31–​2, 36n20, 130 temporary work agency see TWA theory of scientific management 8–​10, 17n10, 18n11, 110–​11, 115n1, 140–​1 training 59–​63, 64–​8, 73–​4, 75n3, 78–​81, 138 see also on-​the-​job training; side-​by-​side trajectories 7, 11, 20, 117–​25, 134, 134n4, 139 ‘transcendent client’ 12, 78–​83 transnational call centre sector 2, 8, 10, 20, 76n12, 111, 124 TWA (temporary work agency) 49, 57–​61, 68–​9, 73, 74n1, 74n2, 75n3, 80, 83, 90, 98–​9, 102, 113, 116n7, 122–​3, 129–​30

Index UGT (União Geral dos Trabalhadores) 27, 36n20 uncertainty 12–​13, 59–​61, 75n4, 76n12, 132 União Geral dos Trabalhadores see UGT unions 22, 26–​7, 38, 43–​4, 48–​9, 52, 54n6, 136–​7 valorisation 4, 9, 10, 13, 18n11, 40, 111–​14, 141 value-​extraction 2, 9–​12, 17n10, 18n11, 20, 25, 34, 34n2, 96–​7, 109–​13, 138, 140–​1 wallboard 104, 108–​9 ‘welfare society’ 28, 36n18, 129 welfare state 25, 28 white-​collar 6–​7, 62, 84 worth 6, 11, 23, 30, 83, 94n8, 113, 125, 138–​9