Abstract
In the 21st century the introduction of digital technologies has been accompanied by a rise in precarious, cheap and vulnerable work. Call centres represent a part of the service sector that exemplifies many aspects of technological innovation, being one of the fastest developing forms of digitalised work. This article draws on 30 semi-structured interviews conducted between 2014 and 2017 with former and present Portuguese and British call centre workers, trade union delegates, activists and academics, aiming at analysing the engagement between trade unions and social mobilisation, that is, how workers engage in new forms of organisation in Portuguese and British call centres.
Highlights
Portugal and the UK are two significant sites for call centre services, favoured for their cheap and skilled labour and for their geographical location and low-cost infrastructures and facilities for the establishment of call centres
In the empirical research realm there is a dearth of comparative analysis between British and Portuguese call centres that looks at trade unionism, social protest movements and occupational identities
The academic interviewees for the present study included Jamie Woodcock, who carried out extensive research in a London call centre in the insurance sector for his PhD thesis using participant observation (Woodcock, 2016), that provided a number of parallels with my own research, as a participant observer, in a Portuguese call centre (Roque, 2010)
Summary
Portugal and the UK are two significant sites for call centre services, favoured for their cheap and skilled labour and for their geographical location and low-cost infrastructures and facilities for the establishment of call centres. I draw on the work of Fuchs (2010:179) who stresses the concept of exploitation in class formation and of Wright (2005:718) who argues that the Marxian concept of class is explicitly normative and political, aiming at the abolition of exploitation and the establishment of a participatory democracy, of emancipatory social change for the economically oppressed In this sense, through an analysis of the role of British and Portuguese trade unions and social mobilisation in call centre service, I explore whether or to what extent these workers constitute themselves as a class-for-itself through workers’ unity (Lukacs, 1971) developing new means of action especially through cyberspace, against the capitalist system and their precarious situation
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