The Australian union movement is in serious trouble and to fix their problems the call centre industry is in their sights. Union membership in the private sector is less than 18 per cent of the workforce, and the worst-case scenarios of decline predict that the movement will disappear by 2012. But unions are not taking their prospective demise lying down and have devised, and are implementing, strategic attacks to rebuild their membership, income and business. The call centre industry features prominently in the union resurgence efforts.
The strategic re-thinking began in 1994, when the ACTU established a unit called Organising Works. The unit creates long-term strategies and trains and assists union operatives on implementation of those strategies at the grass roots. The tactics are sophisticated, multi-disciplined, have long time-frames and draw on lessons learned from activists' community-style alliances. The call centre industry has been subject to such a campaign for almost five years now.
The philosophy underpinning the campaigns can be understood by listening to some of their motivating language. The ACTU talks of working to defeat "the dictatorship of the market", how to "beat our bosses", "protect ourselves against labour market changes" and "employer neutrality is the aim". Their specific actions are multi-pronged and all the elements of the campaign are being used against call centres.
And the campaign being waged by the unions is working. Last year, for the first time since the 1970s, the union movement experienced a growth in membership of 900 people. Modest, yes, but it is the first swing away from decline so far experienced.
In applying their "re-birthing" strategies, the union movement has strategically assessed where best to allocate resources. First, they have sought to rebuild in their traditional base of manufacturing. The increasingly aggressive tactics used in Enterprise Bargaining negotiations over the last three years reflect the new approach. Second, they have assessed those emerging industry areas that appear "factory like". This is their assessment of call centres. The union movement views call centres as a modern form of the slave-like factories of the Dickensian early Industrial Revolution era, and believes that call centres are ripe for traditional factory-type radicalisation.
The third and fourth levels of campaigning focus on the government sector where union influence is already strong, and on information technology and related professional service sectors. The government sector is likely to give the unions results, but the IT sector creates problems for unions because IT "workers" see themselves as professionals and generally can command comparatively high levels of pay, even in a depressed market.
Call centres offer unions one of their great emerging opportunities and substantial resources are being devoted to capture the industry in an incremental process. The unions have significant strategic advantages in this exercise. Call centres generally have younger managers, which is an operational advantage but an industrial disadvantage. Much union activity relies on bluff. Unions use their old and tested tricks on young managers who are caught out in the early stages and take a while to distinguish bluff from legal authority. The atmosphere of call centres is one of "can do" hype. For marketing and promotional purposes, corporate cultures are designed to suppress the negatives and highlight the positives. In industrial campaigning, this creates structural weaknesses for call centres where a culture of "it's okay" pretence pervades decision-making.
In this environment, unions are well down the path to achieving their call centre objectives. They have targeted five of Australia's largest call centres -- Tele Tech, Sitel, UCMS, Salmat and Salesforce -- and have done an internal union carve-up as to which union "owns" which company. This is critical to union strategies in terms of focus, allocation of resources and avoidance of infighting. They have conducted a four-year war of attrition against the Luthansa-owned call centre Global Tele Sales (GTS) where they are close to sealing a new enterprise award. The importance of this move is that the GTS award is designed to set benchmarks that can be applied throughout the entire call centre industry. This should be tied up well before Christmas, thus enabling an aggressive award roll-out process to hit the industry.
The impact of the campaigning has been felt for some years, but it has been largely sporadic and not yet universal. Some call centres are totally locked up by the union, with management's capacity actually to manage squeezed out. Attempts at "change management" are closed, given the ability that selected unions have to "switch off" the centres at a moment's notice -- usually during critical customer servicing or selling phases. So far, these more extreme factory-like industrial relations constrictions are isolated to an unlucky few enterprises.
The big constraint on the unions' campaign is the internationalisation of the industry. While the Australian call centre industry is still in its comparative birth phase, its vulnerability to fast-moving international competitors is high. Sophisticated call centre companies from the Indian sub-continent are actively selling their wares to Australian clients. Does it matter if a call is taken in Sydney, Ballarat, Dubbo, Alice Springs or New Delhi? All that matters is that the call is handled professionally. And India has long had more English speakers from an educated middle class than the entire population of the United Kingdom, let alone Australia. Australian call centres simply do not have the luxury to opt for protective working practics.
The outcome is simple. Australian call centres must perform at world-competitive standards. Otherwise, an industry at the moment in its infancy will die in its childhood. And pay rates are not the issue. It's all about performance. To date, the industry has been able to grow with an exclusive focus on servicing customers. Now the focus is shifting: with one eye on customers and an equal eye on artificial industrial relations requirements. The lynchpin is the way in which call centre workforces are engaged.
Most call centre people see themselves as part of the rapidly expanding paradigm of "free agents", "independent contractors" or whatever tag describes the self-thinking, self-motivating new professional class. The idea of being a wage-slave employee is unsettling for them and being tagged in this way -- as industrial relations fodder -- is close to insulting. These people are part of the 28 per cent of the private-sector workforce that the Australian Bureau of Statistics classify as "non-employees". These independent contractors like to call their own shots and feel more comfortable working through contract management agencies where they can ignore industrial pressures and get on with their own business activities.
Some call centres are responding to this new class and are actively structuring and partnering with contract management agencies in a way that is common in the IT sector. This free-agent response strategy is an effective counter-response to any union push because it denies them legal jurisdiction over the free-agents and the centres. Several call centres have quietly implemented this approach.
The strategies and counter-strategies in play have a significant distance to travel. As always, there will be winners and losers, determined by the strategic options exercised by key players in the industry today. Only time will tell which call centre businesses prosper and which succumb to the growing external pressures.
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