PTPOP - A Mind Revolution

Inside The Headset: Power, Pay, And Surveillance

• PTPOP • Season 7 • Episode 8

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A headset, a timer, and a spreadsheet shouldn’t define a person’s worth. We sit down with labor expert and author Debbie Goldman to unpack how call center work became ground zero for modern management—surveillance dashboards, offshore outsourcing, commissions that move the goalposts, and the quiet erosion of dignity behind every “your call may be recorded.” From the Bell System’s era of regulation and quality benchmarks to a fragmented market obsessed with cost per call, Debbie maps the choices that turned customer service into a high-pressure maze and the collective strategies that pushed back.

We travel through a pivotal timeline: secret monitoring that sparked “stress relief” contract language, the breakup that unleashed non-union competitors, and the rise of global BPOs that promised savings while hiding the costs of repeat contacts and churn. Debbie brings the receipts—Sprint shuttering a call center days before a union vote, organizing drives chilled by fear of closure, and the calculated use of mergers to secure recognition through majority sign-up at AT&T Wireless. Along the way, she reframes customer service as skilled emotional labor, the kind that keeps customers loyal yet remains routinely undervalued in pay structures tilted toward commission and speed.

AI now sits on top of this system, scoring tone, timing breaks, and compressing discretion in the name of efficiency. Debbie doesn’t predict a sci-fi future; she argues for practical guardrails: transparency in monitoring, limits on automated evaluation, and public policy that rewards first-call resolution and real quality over short-term cost cutting. The takeaway is grounded and hopeful—organize where you can, activate where you are, and remember that the person on the line is the company’s voice to the world. If you’ve worked a call queue, led a CX team, or wondered why service so often fails the human test, this conversation connects the dots.

Enjoyed the conversation? Follow the show, share this episode with a coworker, and leave a review to help more listeners find it. 

Buy Debbie's book here: https://a.co/d/05EAwVht
and here https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p088155

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SPEAKER_02:

Hey everybody, PT Pop here, leading you out of the call center rabbit hole, one grand truth at a time, and today I've got a great show for you today. Today I've got Debbie Goldman. She's a writer and labor expert, best known as the former research director and telecommunications policy director for the Communication Workers of America, a major U.S. labor union. In that role, she spent 28 years supporting the union's work on collective bargaining, organizing legislative strategy, and telecommunications policy. She also advocated for the FCC, Congress, the Department of Justice, and state regulatory bodies on behalf of workers. Debbie is the author of this phenomenal book, Disconnected: Call Center Workers Fight for Good Jobs in the Digital Age. This book explores call center work, labor conditions, and worker organizing in the digital economy. Debbie holds a BA in history from Ratcliffe, an MA in education from Stanford, and a PhD in U.S. labor history from the University of Maryland. Debbie, thanks so much for being on my show today. Hey Debbie, how are you today?

SPEAKER_00:

I am good.

SPEAKER_02:

So what first inspires you to write Disconnected Call Center Workers Fight for Jobs in the Digital Age?

SPEAKER_00:

I worked for almost 30 years for the Communications Workers of America, CWA, which is a major labor union in the United States growing out of the telecommunications industry. And therefore, we represented people who came out of what was then the Bell System, ATT, and then what were called the Baby Bells or the local phone companies. And because their call centers, taking orders for new services and answering questions about bills, were part of the people who work there were part of the union. I was assigned to be the in the research department to get to know the kind of issues that they were experiencing and to be, in essence, a clearinghouse, I guess, to assist the mostly women, also men who were working in the call centers to figure out what were the problems and what might be kinds of solutions to make these more dignified, more respectful, more humane jobs. That was my assignment. And so I visited many call centers. We had an annual conference, a CWA conference of call center workers, and I would listen to what was going on, and share they were the workers would share the kinds of solutions that they were coming up with, either different kinds of strategies, collective bargaining strategies, using the grievance procedure, organizing strategies. And after I retired, which was in the year 2020, I decided I wanted to write a book about their experience and how they struggled to bring these jobs into good jobs.

SPEAKER_02:

So what made you realize call centers were such a crucial story to tell?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, we have to talk a little bit particularly about the Bell system.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay.

SPEAKER_00:

In the 1980s and before, the Bell system was a regulated monopoly. And therefore, at the federal level, the Federal Communications Commission and at the state level, public utility commissions regulated the phone companies. And therefore, the regulators were very concerned about quality service. And that was a major, major focus of the training and of the observation and oversight by the managers in the call centers. In 1984, through a consent decree with the Department of Justice, the Bell monopoly was broken up. ATT became a long-distance company, and then there were seven local Bell companies. Competition came first to the long-distance industry, and then eventually to the what we would call more local industry. And as competition came, the importance of customer service was elevated. Prior to this, the biggest job category in the Bell system were the operators who connected calls. At one point, there were a quarter of a million women, and they were all women working as operators. And the kinds of surveillance that we're going to talk about in this interview began as surveillance over those operators. But technology, beginning in the 1960s, the Bell system, which was inventing some of the technologies which we now consider part of the technology revolution, the Bell system was automating a lot of the functions of the operators, and that job category was going down. But with competition, the job category of customer service was growing. And CWA recognized that and recognized that all the power of the that there would be power in representing the customer service occupation. And this was increasingly where the women in the union were. And so this was the as the union, which was primarily dominated, the the leadership was dominated by the male technicians. And I should say before the 1970s, the technicians were all men. That changed because there was a major affirmative action suit against AT ⁇ T, and eventually many of those jobs were required to be opened up to women. And that's when men began to come into the call centers as well. But with this period, it became clear that the male union leaders who dominated the elected leadership did not understand what it was like to work in a call center. And so the women began to organize, not only organize for power vis-a-vis their management, but also organize for power within their union. And ultimately they were successful.

SPEAKER_02:

That's awesome. And and so you had predominantly women. And from what I read in your book, there were a few men sprinkled here and there. And so you said they had they had some form of metrics prior to the digital age. How did they monitor people's work back then?

SPEAKER_00:

Prior to the digital age, so we're really talking about before the mid-1980s. ATT had for decades listened in on their workers, whether it was operators or customer service representatives, had listened in to their phone calls. And that was the primarily way of tracking what was going on. This was called monitoring. And monitoring could be there, it was secret. You didn't know when your supervisor would be listening in. So it was very stressful. And so that was the how long you were on a call, speed of answer, those things were also tracked somewhat.

SPEAKER_02:

Okay, so there was some metrics.

SPEAKER_00:

There was. And what happened was that the operators, as the digitization came into the operator services workplaces, and that began in the 1970s. The operators began to mobilize within the union because they found it extremely stressful. Once that data was collected, there was a push to do things even faster, faster, faster, and it was very stressful. So the women began to organize for what they called stress relief. And this was occurring in the 1970s. They did surveys within the union, they let the male technicians know what it was like to work within that kind of monitoring, and there was pressure to negotiate some kind of relief. And in 1980, so think about that, over 45 years ago, in 1980, CWA at the national level negotiated the first kinds of restrictions on this kind of observation monitoring. The language that was negotiated in the 1980 contract, this was when you still had the unified bill system. The language that was negotiated barred the company from secret monitoring. So it did not say no monitoring. But think about it. If you know when your manager is listening in, then you're able to do things exactly as you're supposed to. And that relieved the kind of stress. But that language only applied to the operators. At that point, again, during the monopoly era, customer service was a relatively small part of the workforce. And it was only as that grew with competition after the 1984 breakup of the Bell system, that those kinds of intensive surveillance began and accelerated because of the introduction of computers, not only to do the work, but to use the computers to track the work, to surveil the work. Then the customer service, the call center workers, began to press that the language and other kinds of language that the operators had negotiated should now cover the call center workers. And different bargaining units were able to make progress around that area for the call center workers. Eventually that applied not just to listening in, but to recording the calls. Because what eventually happened was that the managers didn't have the time to listen to all of these recorded calls. They would sometimes have to go home and listen to the calls. And so some of these protections against abusive monitoring were expanded to include the recording of the calls. And now with the introduction of AI, there's language that is being pushed by the union that would be protecting against AI surveillance.

SPEAKER_02:

Wow. So you touched a little bit on salaries. So back, like when I got my first corporate, big corporate call center job with GT Wireless, I was making like 17,300. But what were some of these ladies making in the 70s? I got a little confused. Were they making like$20,000 to$30,000 a year as a union operator? Or am I mistaken?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, whatever number we would quote, the listeners won't understand that one has to convert those kinds of numbers into today's the value of money today. The Bell system had traditionally valued the kinds of skills that the male technicians had. So they were the highest paid. Then came the customer service reps, who at one point were considered, they worked in small offices, they were more white-collar than the operators. So they were the second tier. The third tier was the operators. And at one point before digitization, you had lots and lots of clerical folks who were entering data and issuing reports and that kind of thing. The clerks were primarily women, the operators were all women, and until the affirmative action suit, even the customer service reps were women. So they earned less than the male technicians. And part of the push by the both the operators and especially the call center workers was to say the kind of work we do, the kind of skills that we have, are is actually quite highly skilled. However, it's different than knowing how to install a telephone, a crap skill. It's an emotional skill. We have to be able to pick up on the wants and the needs of our customers and to be able to sell to them or to service them in a way that requires emotional intelligence. And throughout the occupations in the United States, the kinds of jobs that require emotional intelligence are primarily women, teachers, nurses, flight attendants. I could add others, I'm sure you could think about. And they are not valued. Those skills are not valued as much in the marketplace. Now, in the 1970s and 80s, there was a move which was called pay equity, in which particularly unions, but also women's organizations, were pushing to have employers have a different way of rating the skills of these kinds of jobs and to recognize and elevate the pay for those who exercised the skill of emotional intelligence. And this was going on with our call center workers as well. It was a challenge for them to push to get higher pay. Because the folks that I wrote about were in a union, which is very rare. I should mention that there are about 4 million call center workers in the United States, and less than 5% are in a union. This is not a unionized sector.

SPEAKER_02:

But back then back it was like 90% used to be in the union for ATT, right?

SPEAKER_00:

The Bell system, whether it's ATT or some of the other companies, uh what you would now consider Verizon or SBC, they virtually all of the non-management jobs were union represented. So the the percent was very, very high. And until competition came, the union wages and benefits set the standard for the industry. With competition, that changed. And the competitors initially in the long-distance industry was MCI and Sprint, and then eventually it was the cable companies who were offering internet access and video access, and now the wireless companies. They were all non-union. And as they grew, the pressure on the union side was intense because the managers, the employers said, Well, we can't compete with the non-union companies if we continue to have these generous wages and benefits.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I just I was shocked I was shocked. I think in comparison by today's, you know, if you you incre you add inflation, salaries back in the 70s and 80s were better or stronger than they are today. And I think that has something to do with the competition offshoring everything. But like my salary of 16,000 to 17,000 in like 1989, I think some of the ladies were making 23 to 25,000 in the 70s.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, what's happened is that the pressure of competition has meant that even the union companies have been searching, which do provide good pay. This can be a good paying job, and you get benefits as well. But what the union companies have done is first of all, they've tried to put more and more of the pay into what we would call commission. So that instead of be having a guaranteed wage that would be your living wage, maybe 80%, 60% would be guaranteed, and the rest you'd have to make up with your sales. So that brings a whole element of competition into the call center itself. But what happened beginning in the 90s was that the company said well, actually, what what happened was that with technology it was companies were able to locate the call centers overseas, and the cost of telecommunications itself went down. And a whole set of companies grew up that were just dedicated call center companies. These are huge now. These call center companies operate in 60, 70, 80 countries. They have millions of employees, and they began to go to the providers in the industry. I'm talking about the communication providers.

SPEAKER_02:

The Bell system, there were a bays of records, it was all analog. You could get up and you could talk to a coworker. You had more freedom to roam about. Now, the modern call center, you're literally leashed to the desk with a headset. You can only go to the bathroom on your brakes. It's a very highly monitored thing.

SPEAKER_00:

For the people who worked in the call centers, it got increasingly bad with the advent of competition and with the introduction of the computerization. It began with AT ⁇ T, the long distance company, where competition came first. And they had to set up a customer service operation from scratch in the mid-1980s. Because before then, the questions about the long distance were still handled by the local bell companies. But after the breakup of the Bell system, ATT had to set up a consumer operation. And this is very telling because it shows what happens as you have deregulation and competition coming into a sector and the race to the bottom. AT ⁇ T came to the union, the CWA, and said, we're going to create up to 13,000 new jobs in the call centers that we're creating. We could have those be represented by the union, but if you want representation, you have to agree to a 20% waging cut because we cannot compete with these non-union new entrants into long distance. At that point, it was MCI and Sprint. We cannot compete with the kind of union wages and benefits that you have. If you don't agree to that pay cut, then we're going to outsource. So this was already in the mid-1980s. Who were they going to outsource to? American Airlines, because the airlines had the most sophisticated software database systems. So the union was faced with a real dilemma. What do you do? And the union decided better to have these jobs be union, and we can, over a series of collective bargaining, bargain up the wages than to have to go and organize these folks into the union. And that was the decision that was made. But this had lasting consequences. The local bell companies, where there was not yet competition from the cable companies and there was no not yet wireless at all, the local companies were still a monopoly in the 1990s. You did not have that kind of downward pressure on the wages and benefits. And so a gap developed between the call center workers at ATT and those at the local companies who didn't have to take that 20% wage increase. The next big change came as those big call center companies were getting more and more of the business, outsourced business, from the unionized uh formerly Bell companies. And these call center companies were able to provide, they were non union, they were able to provide cheaper wages. But then they came and they said, you know what? If we send those calls overseas, first to India, now the biggest place. For calls is going to the Philippines. Over a million Filipinos work in call centers. They said if we send these overseas, we can dramatically reduce your labor costs. Like that'll be 10% of what you're paying. So the downward pressure continued with the outsourcing. And outsourcing is now endemic in the call center industry. People, I'm sure, who are listening to this or watching this documentary are frustrated when they try and make phone calls about any kind of customer service because so many of these calls are going overseas. Now the problem is not the workers overseas. They want to make a living, they want to do a good job. The problem is that they are under enormous pressure to keep, to get you off the phone, do it quickly, and often don't have the information to solve your problems. So despite what the union has been fighting for for decades, which is company, employer, understand that your competitive advantage is quality service. If we can really give good service, customers are going to use us. But instead, the pressure is cheaper, cheaper, cheaper. And what that's meant then is that there's been a dramatic decline in customer service. And it leaves the customers with very few choices. And because of deregulation, no longer are the regulators overseeing the quality of service.

SPEAKER_02:

So it's it's competition, it's not necessarily greed that drove the salaries down and drove calls or jobs offshore. It was it was some ways they had no choice to stay competitive and I guess meet the bottom line.

SPEAKER_00:

I guess that's well they they did have a choice. Companies can opt for competing on the basis of quality. And we we when we were fighting against the outsourcing, at one point where we were actually able to get a lot of data from the companies, and what they focus on is something called cost per call. What does it cost per call? We then were able to get information from the companies that if the problem is not solved, because the the customer service rep is either under pressure of time or doesn't have the information she needs, then there will be a second call made, and that's costly. We were able to show that there are many costs that can be racked up to not giving good service, but the companies were short are short-sighted. And let's when you say was a greed or was a competition, for many years there was a view in the United States, in our public policy, that we needed to have some kind of oversight over the way in which business operated, put in some kind of guardrails. So everything was not just about the free market, but that began to change in our public policies, and deregulation accelerated in the airlines, in trucking, in transportation, and in telecommunications, in labor, in finance, and as deregulation accelerated, what you found was those kind of guardrails were no longer around the limits to which what companies could do. So the profit motive was driving in concert with the implementation of these new technologies, was driving the race to the bottom. And that's where we are, and it's been accelerating ever since.

SPEAKER_02:

What effects did you see about the digital monitoring, the increased stress in the worker? What did you see? How was it affecting the worker when things became digital?

SPEAKER_00:

Once the employers had this vast ability of technology to track everything. What order you went through your screens, how long you were on a call, how long you took a break, the now the tone of voice that you use, the the spreadsheet with all of the things that are tracked over one individual goes 2030 items. And if an employer wants to, they can find that you are failing. Oh, and and by the way, a lot of tracking of sales. What did you sell? When, how much, all of this.

SPEAKER_02:

Um, why don't we jump to because one thing I'm trying to do uh in the film is is point out, in my opinion, from what I kind of I think if I understood from your book, they're kind of squeezing the unions out, and employees have less and less representation and nobody watching their back. So can we kind of discuss how the unions have kind of gradually been squeezed out?

SPEAKER_00:

We've had a major attack on unions in this country really over the past 50 years. It dates back to the 1970s. After World War II, coming out of the depression, out of the war, about a third of the workforce was unionized. And I should emphasize that at that point, government workers, whether state, local, or federal, were not, did not have collective bargaining rights. So when you talk about a third of the workforce were in unions, you're basically talking about the industrial sector and then the transportation sector, the telecommunication sector, were dominated by unions and they set the standards and were bargaining improved wages and working conditions and benefits. For about 20 years after World War II, the Europeans, the Japanese were still recovering from the war. And so US industry and other sectors really didn't face a lot of global competition. That changed by the 1970s. The Japanese, the Europeans began to compete with the U.S. And profit margins for U.S. companies became smaller. So U.S. companies looked around and they said, well, what can we do to increase our profit margins? Hey, let's insist on deregulation by government so that we have fewer restrictions over what we can do, and let's attack unions because of their wages. Let's say that we can't be competitive globally if we continue to pay these kinds of wages. And so you found that employers were increasingly fighting the expansion of unions into new sectors of the economy. And this happened in telecommunications. So that let me give an example. I talked a lot about the breakup of ATT and new two new non-union companies coming in to compete for long distance, MCI and Sprint. CWA got contacted by employees at those companies who said, we see the good wages and benefits at ATT. We want the same. Can you assist us in organizing? The first organizing took place in the state of Michigan, outside of Detroit, in a call center. What did MCI do? They shut it down. And with a flick of a switch, you can rewrote the calls to another call center. So CWA said, well, we can't just organize one call center by one call center, and began to get a lot of requests from employees at Sprint to help them form a union. And at one point, there were organizing committees in dozens of SPRINT call centers and operator centers. The first one that looked like there was going to be a majority interest was a call center in San Francisco that specialized in reaching out to Spanish-speaking people in the United States who were making a lot of long-distance calls overseas to Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries. This subsidiary of SPRINT was called La Conexión Familiar, the family connection. They had about 200 call center workers. Their conditions were unbelievably awful. They were told don't drink water because you'll have to go to the bathroom. They were told you'll get a commission if you meet these kind of sales. And then when they began to meet those sales, the commission quotas were increased. So they never got those commissions. This group came over to CWA and said, we want a union. And a majority publicly put their name on a petition for a union. There was going to be a union vote. Two days before the union vote, Sprint, the corporate parent, shut the facility down and rerouted the calls to Dallas, Texas. CWA saw this as the important case in which we needed to show that companies could not shut down a facility, which is a violation of law, to shut down a facility to avoid a union. And the case went first to court, to the National Relations Board. The National Relations Board ruled that SPRINT indeed had violated the law. Then it went to court, it went to the appeals court. In the meantime, the tech the Mexican Union filed a complaint under the North America Free Trade Agreement to say that Sprint was violating U.S. labor law, which was a violation of that North American Free Trade Agreement. There was massive pressure from all kinds of women's groups, labor groups, community groups, politicians to say, Sprint, you've broken the law. Let these people have their jobs back. Ultimately, the court ruled we can't really determine whether it was shut down to avoid the union or for economic reasons, even though there was massive evidence that it was to avoid the union. This sent a chill throughout the company. And others hear about that and they become afraid to organize. The choice is not a union job or a non-union job. The choice becomes a job or no job. And no job is often a very scary option for people. So that's the kind of attack that we've been experiencing for the past 50 years. As a result, the percent of unionized workers in the United States is below 10%. In the private sector, it's below 6%. In telecommunications, where you still have the legacy of the unionized sector, it's about 15 or 16 percent. So union power has really diminished.

SPEAKER_02:

Because in the old days in the telecommunications sector, it was about 90% union, and now it's down to 15%, you said?

SPEAKER_00:

Yep. Because think about the big providers. These are all non-union companies. Comcast, Spectrum, the cable companies, T-Mobile, Verizon, they're all non-union. The only union wireless company is ATT. Why? And that's a very interesting story. ATT is a result, AT ⁇ T Wireless is the result of the merger of a variety of other wireless companies. And as though in the 1990s, as those wireless companies were buying each other up, the company that was spurring that was a company based out of Texas called SBC. And SBC had to get permission from the regulators in order to buy these other companies. And in order to get approval, they knew that they would needed the union on their side. Because at that point, regulators were actually doing their job and looking at will this benefit consumers? Will it benefit workers? And there was a lot of concern that the mergers were going to make companies bigger, but not necessarily better. And so the companies came to CWA and said, we would like you politically to support the merger. And CWA said, well, we can see why the shareholders want to make more money from the merger, but how is this going to help the workers? If it will only help the workers, if the new companies are represented by a union who can continue to bargain for a share of the value that we create. And so SBC at that point agreed to a process of letting the workers join the union called majority sign-up, not having to go through what I consider our failed system of the National Labor Relations Act. But instead, if a majority of the employees, and it's verified they do this without pressure, sign up for a union, the company will recognize the union. And because of that, through these mergers, AT ⁇ T Wireless, which became the new name of all these merged wireless companies, is a union represented company. However, they operate in an environment that is a majority non-union. And therefore there's enormous pressure in the collective bargaining at AT ⁇ T Wireless to be competitive, which therefore puts wages and benefits in a race to the bottom.

SPEAKER_02:

Wow. And that's that's fascinating to hear how it's it's all changed so much.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. I would say that we we operate in a capitalist system, and therefore the drive of employers to maximize profit for their shareholders is a constant. But what has changed is the view that there is a role for government to ensure that that competitive model also protects consumers and protects workers and pays attention to other kinds of things like the impact on the environment, health and safety. So what has changed is a view that there was a role for government to protect people. And I think now we're in another period, vast period, in which there's a challenge to the prevailing sense that the market, the drive for profit, should be the only thing driving what companies do.

SPEAKER_02:

With the advent of AI, what do you think the workplace of the future looks like?

SPEAKER_00:

I have no idea.

SPEAKER_02:

Okay.

SPEAKER_00:

I can tell you that that what the unions are doing is staying on top of what's going on and trying to do what they've always done around the introduction of new technology, which is to say when there's an introduction of new technology, the workers and their representative, their collective representative of the union, should be at the table as well.

SPEAKER_02:

If and we can wrap this up, I'll just get one final question that I've been asking people. If if you could speak directly to call center representatives today, who you know, or people that are watching this documentary that working them, what would you say to them? What would you give say to them to give them hope? Or how would you address their current situation?

SPEAKER_00:

If you're in a union workplace, become an activist. The union is you. And so what happens is based on what you put into it. The union is not a third party, it's you. Become an activist. And for those who work in non-union workplaces, join with your fellow employees, talk about what's going on. And while it's a challenge, reach out, see if there's a possibility to organize. If not, there are other ways that you can exercise your collective power. Build on the idea that you are the voice of the company to the public. And therefore, there is an interest by the employer, by the company, that you have good jobs, good employment, good morale, so that you are representing the company in a positive way to the customers and build on that to try and make good changes for yourselves. We've had many periods in our history in which working people have had quite a number of challenges in the workplace. But by joining together, they have managed, we have managed to make positive change. We need hope. Not false hope, but real hope. Because we by joining together can have power.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, as we wrap up today, I want to thank Debbie Goldman for taking time to share her insights and her work. Her book, Disconnected, Call Center Workers, Fight for Good Jobs, and Digital Age, is more than a book about labor or technology. It's a record of real people trying to hold on to dignity in a system designed to measure, monitor, and squeeze every second of their working lives. Pretty much out of existence. If you've ever worked in a call center like I have, or if you've ever wondered what really happens on the other end of that headset, this conversation matters. These stories don't live in spreadsheets or productivity dashboards. They live with the workers who carry them home every night. Thanks for watching, listening, and supporting conversations that give voice to people who are usually kept on mute. I'm PT Pop, and if you're interested in Debbie's book, again I've had it displayed here. You can find it on Amazon as well as on www.press.uillinois.edu. I'll leave a link to both in the description here. So I hope you're having a good day.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, I understand you now. But you like fries to daddy.

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