What’s on the Line?: Exploring the Significance of Gendered Everyday Resistance Within the Transnational Call Center Workplace

‘Get paid, get out’: online resistance to call centre labour in Canada

“…At present, it appears that call centre work in Canada is unlikely to disappear in the foreseeable future. Redden () notes that corporations such as Dell took advantage of provincial tax credits in Canada in 2006, gaining approximately 11 million dollars in workers’ salaries at one Ottawa‐based call centre. While the tax credit was removed in 2013, the call centre industry continues to dominate low‐paid work in Canada due to the demand for customer service and sales services from transnational manufacturing and service industries (Redden, ).…”

“…This critical manoeuvre translates the affect of alienation and subordination into a kind of knowledge requisite for the act of denouncing the employer. In other studies, call centre employees revolted against their organisations by withholding emotional labour (Kahlin and Tykesson, ; Redden, ). This employee, who like other reviewers was confronted by the inability to speak freely in a sales culture that worships production for production's sake, instead used emotional and artistic expression to transcend the robotic hierarchies and discourses of communication prevalent in so many call centres (Poster, , ).…”

“…Despite often being reliable employees, women are more likely to experience dissatisfaction with call centre work than their male counterparts, due to their lower position in the company hierarchy and a lack of accommodation in shift scheduling (Echchakoui and Naji, ). Women with children often stay in call centres to provide income for their families, fearing the potential risks associated with pursuing better work (Redden, ). Lloyd and Payne () dispute the conception of emotional labour as skilled work, and query whether the willingness to remain at a stressful, boring, and abusive workplace should in fact qualify as a skill, particularly when wages do not match those of other skilled jobs.…”

“…Notwithstanding such attempts to produce docile workforces, subtle forms of resistance counter overt cultural control and surveillance. One example is withholding emotional labour (Redden, ), whereby employees refuse to provide that ‘something special’ to clients by rigid adherence to scripts or declining to go ‘above and beyond’ (Kahlin and Tykesson, ). Another example includes making pretend conversations with voice mail services to control the pace of labour (Bain and Taylor, ; Barnes, ).…”

Feminist international relations: some research agendas for a world in transition

“…involving Dominique Strauss Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund), the masculinist cultures of financial institutions, corresponding patriarchal and racist policies and practices, and the role they play in affirming existing power relations (Montoya 2016;Hozic 2016;Enloe 2013). They also continue to explore how gender, race, and class structure everyday relations on factory floors, in fields, call centers, and households (Gunawardana 2016;Redden 2016).…”