We do not know enough to pronounce with any authority on the claims made earlier this week by laid off workers at the NPIC Call Centre regarding their conditions of work, though some of those claims bear a striking resemblance to complaints made by employees of call centres in other parts of the world.
The findings of studies of the experiences of call centre employees in India, the Philippines, Turkey and Brazil, to name just a few countries, have indicated that, on the whole, call centres have a reputation for poor pay, less than encouraging conditions of work and supervisor harassment so severe that it can sometimes lead to illness.
In India, for example, a debate has been ongoing for more than five years over whether employees of call centres are not simply victims of exploitation. Some years ago, a report from a government-funded think tank in India compared some centres with ‘Roman slave galley ships’. Movie watchers who would have seen films like Ben Hur would have an idea of the type of image the expression conjures up. You are chained to your oar and you simply row until you are utterly exhausted after which you are replaced by another rower. It is a vicious and relentless cycle of abuse.
While no one is suggesting that that is in fact the case in Guyana, the NPIC situation is by no means the first of its kind. Other workers, in other call centres in Guyana, have complained about unwholesome treatment. If only because many call centres around the world have pretty shabby reputations as places of work, the concerns expressed by the former NPIC employees warrant some kind of investigation.
The Government of Guyana and President Bharrat Jagdeo, personally, have, at various times held forth on the importance of Guyana positioning itself to become a host for more call centres. The attraction of call centres to a country like ours is obvious. They provide employment for large numbers of young people and the job itself, once learnt becomes repetitive. One the other hand, numerous studies by various reputable think tanks and international organizations including the International Labour Organization (ILO) have frowned on employment practices in call centres and have sought to apply such pressure as they can for change. The problem is, of course, that in poor countries like our own, the need find employment for people sometimes far exceeds any kind of official will to ensure that conditions of work confirm with ILO standards. Moreover, the level of employee protest in the private sector tends to be much lower if only because to protest the conditions of work in many, perhaps most cases, means to run the risk of having no work at all.
There are numerous cases – and Guyana is probably one of them – in which the executives of companies that own and operate call centres know or care little about either the host country or the nationals who staff the call centres. Local heads of their operations are, as much as the lower level employees, paid servants, under strict directives that have mostly to do with productivity. Low wages, of course, are one of the very rationales for country selection to host call centres. Steeped in their focus on financial returns, they, in all likelihood, neither care nor know anything about a country’s labour laws nor about ILO conventions of decent work. Of course, there is no shortage of governments, which, keen to reap the political benefits of having call centres impact positively on their employment figures are quite prepared to turn a blind eye to the exploitation of their people.
Some of the complaints of the local NPIC former employees including low wages and mistreatment by supervisory staff bear a striking resemblance to concerns that have been raised by call centre employees in other countries. Of course, again as is the case elsewhere, formal worker representation is simply not on the cards since no self-respecting worker representative is likely to countenance the kind of treatment which call centre workers often endure and the owners of call centres are certainly not about to allow national labour laws and trade union representation to dictate their operational policies.
If no one is suggesting that call centres be discouraged from coming to Guyana, it is instructive to know that research into the conditions of service which they offer elsewhere in the world suggest that that they are by no means paragons of virtue. The evidence would appear to suggest that some call centres simply recruit, abuse then discard young people, who, in many cases, are having their first experience of paid employment. There is therefore more than good reason for Minister of Labour Manzoor Nadir to not only investigate the complaints that have been expressed by the former NPIC workers but also ensure that the mechanisms at his ministry’s disposal are employed to continually monitor both the conditions of work and the conditions of service at local call centres. The jobs that they provide may make some measure of difference to the lives of their local employees but we should not be prepared to accommodate them at any price.
