Customer Service Organising Month
October 2004
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"Quality jobs - Quality services"

Raising the standards

 The jobs which are most at risk of migrating offshore are those which are predominantly routine and unskilled.  There is a strong argument, therefore, for unions to redouble their efforts to push for proper lifelong learning opportunities for employees.

Interestingly, some of the problems facing call centre staff in the West appear to be being replicated in India – the monotony and pressure of the work, for example, is leading to high rates of staff turnover.  One Indian report claimed that GE Capital’s large call centre at Gurgaon is now receiving fifty resignations a day: “retaining these on-the-move agents has become the greatest challenge that human resource managers have ever faced”. 

There are numerous excellent examples of unions taking initiatives in training and learning to improve their members’ employability. 

Telecom

• One long-established example is the Alliance for Employee Growth and Development (‘the Alliance’), a partnership between AT&T, Lucent, the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW).
• Also in the United States, the National Advisory Coalition for Telecommunications Education (NACTEL) brings together employer representatives from several leading telecoms companies with CWA and IBEW union representatives.
• In Australia, the engineers’ union APESMA has worked with a number of universities to establish an MBA (Technology Management) degree course for its members, and this initiative has been adapted by the UK telecom managers’ union Connect for its own members.
• Connect has also worked to provide its members working for British Telecom with the chance to take a BSc (Honours) degree in Computer Science.
• SINDETELCO (Portugal) has worked with vocational training advisory committees in developing training programmes for professional staff in the telecoms and the postal sector.

IBITs 

Finance 

Commerce 

Employers and unions in the European Telecom sector signed up to guidelines to raise standards in customer contact centres across the enlarged EU.   With the backing of the European Commission, UNI-Europa Telecom and the employers’ group ETNO committed to providing quality jobs for staff and quality service for customers. 

The guidelines  include provisions for:

• Consultations over customer contact strategy and policies.

• Training and re-training of staff to meet technological and product changes.

• Quality work places.

• Transparent work measurement that includes quality of service as well as quantity and time.

• Core labour standards that include the right to form unions and to bargain.

The social partners in European Telecom have already produced guidelines for teleworking and are currently looking at health and safety issues, creating a more socially inclusive labour force and developing skills.

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