We publish here a letter from a call centre worker, entitled “We accept you, We accept you, One of us, Gooble Gobble, Gooble Gobble, one of us”, which describes the methods of indoctrination that big business uses to try and passify workers and set them against one another. Call centre workers are some of the most exploited in the UK and are an area of services industries that are in need of unionisation in order to fight back against such exploitation.
We publish here a letter from a call centre worker, entitled “We accept you, We accept you, One of us, Gooble Gobble, Gooble Gobble, one of us”, which describes the methods of indoctrination that big business uses to try and passify workers and set them against one another. Call centre workers are some of the most exploited in the UK and are an area of services industries that are in need of unionisation in order to fight back against such exploitation.
Dear Socialist Appeal,
After a relatively short time on Job Seekers Allowance I have recently started working in a call centre for Apple. Although this event in and of itself is not that important or special, the training period that I went through for the job had elements that highlighted an aspect of the class struggle that is not often commented on, and which I thought it worth writing about.
As with a lot of call centre jobs the first four weeks of my employment were filled with an intensive period of training. Now, this was a relatively painless experience, as most of it was classroom based and the hours were 9am-5.30pm, Monday through Friday so it wasn’t too difficult to organise our lives around this to get some rest and still have a social life. But, right from the offset we were confronted with attempts at borderline indoctrination. It might be worth me explaining what I mean by this.
This relates to the on-going ideological struggle within the work place which takes place on a day to day basis. I would go so far as to describe the first week of training as being almost like some kind of cult seminar in which the trainers desperately tried to impress upon us how, to the customer, we “are Apple” and how big that responsibility was for each individual worker. They were trying to instil in us how to the customers calling us up we are these “mythical beings living in some shiny silver space station in the sky that can solve all of their problems because Apple is Apple, the best company in the world. Bwaahahahhahahahahaha”.
Apologies for adding the sinister laugh, I did exaggerate that part but we were told the rest. And here I was thinking we were working in a grotty call centre on the banks of a muddy river. Needless to say, a lot of this was over egging the pudding, but it is true to say that customers do expect a lot from the products produced by Apple and they expect a great deal from the customer experience which they deserve to get from such a big company.
It was emphasised time and again to us how incredibly important this customer experience was for projecting the correct image for Apple and how invaluable we were in this process. This added a great deal of pressure on us and was supplemented with lectures on how excellent Apple’s products were and how we all would be better off with them in our lives. This was a feeble attempt to get us to “buy-in” to the Apple “lifestyle”.
Over the weeks, the company were also at pains to explain to us how Apple, “look after our employees. If you work hard and are good to Apple, Apple will be good to you.” Now, you’ll forgive me if I simply found this quite surreal as I had visions of Chinese Foxconn workers “falling” out of windows in attempts to escape the horrible conditions they were working in to produce Apple’s products. This must’ve simply been a misunderstanding that I had. Evidently those workers were highly confused individuals and rather than trying to escape horrible working conditions and terrible exploitation Foxconn is really a heaven on this earth which any worker should be honoured to work for (once again, apologies for the sarcasm).
Every aspect of the training was geared towards not only preparing us for the job bus also psychologically conditioning us to identify our interests and those of management as being the same and to turn us against “unproductive” or “uncooperative” workers ,making it easier for them to isolate us and pick us off one-by-one if necessary, if we start asking too many questions or making too many demands. This also breeds a passive acceptance of the impositions of management. We were constantly reminded how if we “worked hard” there would be plenty of incentives (free booze and chocolate for the best sales people) and room for advancement and promotion, which in reality would only be available to those willing to attack their fellow workers and prove their loyalty to the company.
Now this element of the class struggle is one which, whilst not talked about often, is still an incredibly important part of every worker’s experience, showing the way in which the ruling class as a whole, as well as individual companies, try to condition us in the work place. This is even more so the case in non-unionised work forces when the lines between the interests of the workers and those of the company get blurred and it is difficult for workers to get a voice in any aspect of their experience.
I am glad to say that my fellow trainees and I did survive this experience and made it through to being taken on permanently. To be honest, though I half expected on the last day that we would enter the call floor to find rows of workers behind desks, wearing Apple t-shirts, staring at us and chanting the phrase “We accept you, We accept you, One of us, Gooble Gobble, Gooble Gobble, one of us,” before handing us t-shirts, placing us behind computers and plugging us into the system.
Thankfully I was disappointed in this regard and it became self-evident that I was not the only one who was not taken in by the attempts to ideologically buy us off. It is difficult to work in non-unionised work places, but not without hope and I am confident that in time I and my fellow workers will begin to organise and at a certain stage be in a better position to provide a voice for ourselves in this oppressive environment.
Until tomorrow comrades,
A call centre drone
