3 ms·
Well there are people who are, you know, less responsible than others, who will also tend to be correlated to the lower-pay employees. If you, say, had the brig
by jerf 7y ago
Well there are people who are, you know, less responsible than others, who will also tend to be correlated to the lower-pay employees. If you, say, had the bright idea of starting an "ethical" call center that didn't track when people came in, and since you'll be pulling from the same pool because it's not like you can afford to pay call center employees $30/hr, and you decide "I'm not going to track anyone's time!"...
well, frankly, the obvious is going to happen. You're going to get people outright lying to you about being present. It won't take long before you start tracking time.
And so on for most of the other practices there.
But jerf...
I'm only talking about the other side of the complex of forces that inevitably emerges from this sort of low pay situation. It doesn't mean that employees ought to be treated as subhumans, obviously. Another aspect is that this sort of control will also attract management who enjoys wielding that sort of power. Management isn't guilty. But these restrictions are all generally reactions to the problems management had getting their employees to show up on time. There's a whole back and forth of events that inevitably occurs at scale, which is why the whole job has a bad rep, not just particular companies. The same forces produce convergent evolution between all the companies that have large call centers.
You'll get similar experience managing a McDonalds, or any number of other places where you're trying to get a whole bunch of low-paid people doing a particular job.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoThanks for explaining the dynamics of these jobs so clearly. So when you say, "It isn't all just being a jerk for being a jerk's sake.", you essentially mean that everyone involved is a victim of the circumstances? That these jobs naturally attract certain types of people on both employee and management side, trap them, and pit them against each other?
- esotericn 7y agoYes. Swathes of low paid jobs are like this. You're trying to motivate people who really aren't getting much out of the deal. The "managers" are still earning biscuits. Everyone I know who works in retail, for example, seems to be stuck in a sick system hellscape. If you win, you still lose because the "best job" in a store is still only realistically suitable for a teenager.
- int_19h 7y agoThose circumstances don't come out of thin air. In the end, there are specific people who explicitly create them, and profit off them. Also, I don't think that "those places attract a certain type of managers" is much of an excuse for those managers.
- jerf 7y agoI typo'ed. I said "management isn't guilty" but I meant to type "management isn't guilt-free". I also agree that there people who profit, but I encourage you to see that as part of the dynamics rather than an exceptional case that somehow happens every time. It is perfectly predictable that people who will try to profit from this will enter the system, in ways both monetary and psychological. It's merely the n'th step, not some sort of surprise.