Crummy deal for call centre workers

14 July 2014
A call centre worker

Call centre workers at Stellar around Australia were narrowly defeated in trying to reject a company-drafted enterprise agreement that froze wages for three of the next four years.

Workers on Stellar’s Vodafone contract in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley were slugged the hardest: their 17 percent overnight shift loading was thrown out the window.

Stellar, the late 1990s offspring of Telstra and the Texas-based Jensen Family, was set up to outsource call centre work on the cheap and undermine established CEPU and CPSU industry awards.

The recent agreement was accepted by a narrow 54 percent majority. Nevertheless, delegates and union members have drawn positives from the result. At a post-EA meeting, one worker proudly stated: “Nine months ago, before our push for respect, this agreement would have polled 90 percent. Now management aren’t even promoting the result.”

Further to the wage freeze, Stellar has introduced monthly incentive payments.

Employees capable of structuring their daily work routine to the precision of seconds are rewarded with a monthly incentive payment of $30-50.

The requirements? An average phone call time of 497 seconds and 95 percent adherence to a strict start, break and finish schedule. Receive a phone call that runs more than five minutes over the time you were scheduled to take a break or finish? Take one more 70-second bathroom break than the roster allowed for? Adherence target gone for the day.

If the process of structuring every second of your work routine around Stellar’s meticulous productivity requirements has forced you to take a single day of sick leave (something hard to avoid in battery farm call centres), you can take your monthly minimum pay without the trimmings, in the sound knowledge that the extra profit you painstakingly generated will go to some rich Texan arsehole family’s fleet of Hummers.

The upside is that sites with existing union membership have increased density quite considerably through organising against this degrading offer. That gives us a base, and the experience, to take up the fight again in the future.


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