| Canadian call centres in the 'new economy' are the subject matter of this thesis. This thesis examines both the political economy of call centres and service work in the North American context and how a labour process unfolds in a southern Ontario call centre, which is owned by an American-based transnational corporation. The rapid expansion of call centres has coincided with the growth in the outsourcing and offshoring of services. The increasing tendency of transnational corporations to offshore and outsource support services is linked with advances in information and communications technologies (ICTs), global economic restructuring, the proliferation of free trade agreements, and the general ascendancy of neoliberalism. The world of work and the international division of labour have been impacted by these developments. This thesis contends that instead of jobs for all, empowered and autonomous workers, exciting, rewarding, highly-skilled, and well-paying work, and other predictions associated with the 'new economy,' precarious employment, disempowered and exploited workers, an alienating, degrading, and deskilled labour process, and low wages are what arise. The labour process in many outsourced and offshored call centres, such as the one that is the case study for this thesis, exhibits many Taylorist tendencies. Taylorism has reappeared in the service sector under the name of business process reengineering, and key to this strategy is management harnessing the capacities of ICTs to exercise control over and direct the labour process. The tendency of reengineering is to rationalize, routinize, standardize, simplify, and automate the labour process. However, as in the past, individual and collective resistance by workers to management and capital manifests in many ways. According to workers at this call centre, the terms and conditions of employment are less than desirable. This thesis suggests that further research is needed on labour processes in Canadian call centres to see if working conditions are similar throughout the Canadian call centre sector. |
