> call center work seems brutal and cruel [...] it's probably best for worker's mental health if these jobs go away entirely They are sadistic in the most lite

> call center work seems brutal and cruel [...] it's probably best for worker's mental health if these jobs go away entirely They are sadistic in the most literal sense-- the conditions you have to put up with are directly lifted from the pages of any mental/emotional sadomasochism tutorial. You're nitpicked over everything and held to conflicting standards that are impossible to meet, and constantly threatened with firing. They want calls resolved without escalation, but you can't spend more than n minutes on the phone to do it. Here's a half-complete KB from 10 years ago to reference. You say good riddance, but these jobs are the best some rural communities can hope for. They paid 3x anything else in the area (a whopping $11/hr back in 2006). Next best thing was Walmart ($8-9). Everything else was minimum wage. Eliminate jobs like this and new opportunities for an unskilled labor force do not replace them.