one more post today

Ipod was on shuffle while i checked email and Operation Ivy's "Hedgecore" came on. Hadn't listened to it in at least seven or eight years. Didn't remember the moment at the end when Jesse Michaels starts howling the lyrics to Journey's "Lights." WTF.

Got Your Number

Jobs With Justice, together with the CWA and several Indian labor groups, have issued a report on the working conditions in outsourced call centers in both India and the US.

In the US:

In terms of working conditions of US workers, it reveals that
• Subcontractors are under intense pressure to maintain low costs and meet certain
efficiency goals.
• Electronic monitoring of employees at work is a common feature
• Call handling time varies between nine minutes in call centres serving large business or
providing IT services to 4.7 minutes for retail and financial services centres.
• The number of customers per employee per day ranges from 56 in IT service centres and
66 in business centres to 83 in outsourced centres and 99 in retail centres.
• Call centre employees work 40 hours per week on an average, with a range of 35 hours
per week in retail and outsourced centres and over 40 hours in large business and IT
service centres.

In India:

• Workers have to meet daily targets and maintain a consistently good performance, as the
salary package is linked to performance. To meet these daily targets, workers have to
work overtime Compulsory night shifts for men and women, and long working hours
make the workers more vulnerable to psychological and health risks related to work.
• Abusive callers and irate customers significantly add to the stress of a call centre worker.
• The atypical working hours and adoption of ‘western names’ and etiquettes throws the
workers into cultural confusion.
• More than 20% of the workers have severe health problems and behavioural disorders.

Among the reccomendations:

3) Customer service workers need a voice on the job. That’s the only way workers will be a
part of the workplace and be able to have a real investment in providing quality customer
service. Union representation can be an asset to companies as well, but far too many US
employers seek to block workers who want a union voice. For the US, this will require
real changes in labour law and employer behaviour to enable workers’ to make a fair
choice about union representation.

Customer service employees’ organizations in the US need to join hands with all working
people in ensuring labour law reform.

4) Customer service workers around the globe must work together and support each
others’ concerns, and not allow multi-national companies to pit us against each other.
CWA works closely with UNI unions and other worker organizations to build support for
the work of customer service and sales workers and to stop companies from pitting
workers against each other in a race to the bottom.

Organizing customer service employees in the Global South, where multinationals
subcontract their functions, is a priority and unions in the Global North must play a pro-
active role in working with organizations that are focused on organizing such workers.
Only through the formation of worker organizations, can genuine collaboration begin to
fight the global force of multinationals and subcontracting.

5) Call centre workers – no matter where they work – must recognize we are fighting
against a common problem: employers who are chasing the lowest possible costs no
matter what the expense to the customer service worker.

Development of international educational materials, tailored to local conditions, and
communication between customer service workers across the globe are essential for
debunking the myths that divide workers and help the multinationals.

To read the whole thing, click the link above.

The Joys of Democracy

Today's WSN carries a fascinating story on the Graduate Student Council(our student government)'s attempt to force an up or down vote on the company union.

During the senate meeting, alternate Graduate School of Arts and Science senator Roy Perez said the GSC announced unanimous opposition from its constituents to the proposal for a House of Delegates, which aims to function as the elected body of NYU’s Assembly of Graduate Students & Fellows. They say an “up or down vote” will determine whether such a body would be “an adequate, appropriate representative body.”

Among the ironies are Cate Stimpson accusing the GSC of being unnacountable:

Catherine Stimpson, dean of NYU’s Graduate School of Arts and Science, questioned whether the letter represented the views of the entire GSC.

“It is my understanding that a statement of unanimous opposition to the structure committee’s proposal came from the officers and not from the Council as a whole,” Stimpson said. “This is an important distinction. ... The statement that I saw was issued before there had been any physical or virtual meeting of the Graduate Student Council as a whole for this academic year.”

Stimpson said the House of Delegates could help graduate students.

“Graduate students from across the university have worked tirelessly to propose a pioneering structure for graduate assistants and fellows,” Stimpson said. “I look forward to working with the members of the House of Delegates and to the successful building of graduate student governance.”

So our elected representatives are somehow less accountable than schills the administration handpicked to create a governance structure we have no real voice in or power through. A curious argument from someone whose grievance procedures put in place after the expiration of the contract have only now shifted complaints filed in March to the "formal" stage. Meanwhile, there are folks in the English department who still haven recieved all their paychecks this year. What's particularly strange is that Dean Stimpson transferred a tiny fragment of the authority that once resided in the collective bargaining relationship to a glorified prom committee, and then, when the parent committee of the glorified prom committee starts actually attempting to represent the interests of the folks who elected them, the Dean accuses them of overstepping their authority. It's surreal.

“While they are issuing press releases, I can’t — even as an elected member of a student council and of this year’s Graduate Affairs Committee — find any accountability in this structure,” Carrington said. “A hug from the president and a fictive form of graduate-student voice would be equally magical solutions to my very real problems.”

Linking to SEIU's website for the janitors' strike in Houston, Tejas. Please call Chevron and tell them to "take responsibility for poverty conditions in Houston." The strike has been going on for about two weeks and is against national cleaning subcontractors employed by Chevron, Hines, and other Houton-based TNCs.

Picked up Oliver Wang's Soul Sides, Volume 1 compilation the other day, and whatever reservations one might have about Wang's blog, (which I've occasionally found to be really great,) his weird feud with Jean Grae, etc., the cd is excellent - mostly great stuff I had never heard before except as sampled by others - Joe Bataan's "Ordinary Guy," Donny Hathaway's cover of Lennon's "Jealous Guy," "Piece of My Heart" as covered by Aretha's sister Erma, Linda Lyndell's "What A Man," - which inspired Salt n Pepa and En Vogue's "Whatta Man," and William Bell's "I forgot to be your lover," -- which Dilated Peoples sampled on "Worst Comes to Worst," before they got really, really boring. Plus, Weldon Irvine. The addition of Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings' "All Over Again" as the last track is somewhat strange given the years and contexts which separate the 60's and 70's gems Wang selects and this great but self-consciously retro-revivalist track from the 2005 record Naturally. But it's nevertheless worth checking out.


I'm looking forward to hearing the Lady Sov record. Also, I'm tired. Also, commercial on TV about cleaning substance a la draino but called "CLR." Apparently it's "everywhere." Transnational like its namesake?

pathetic peoplehood and computer lab ettiquette

It's been a busy week. Presentation tuesday, and i just finished a paper about five hours ago. Tuesday afternoon, around 1 PM, I was sitting in the ITS computer lab in the school of ed. building finishing up my presentation on CLR James for my postcolonial Marxism class. Because of the ADD, i get all sensitive to noise when i'm trying to write stuff i have to ocncentrate real hard on (not like blog entries,) and sometimes people in that lab are very loud, in which case sometimes i do my little mutter-scowl barely passive-aggressive schtick for a few seconds until I catch myself, reqalize I'm only an old man in Julie Math (fast approaching the big 9-0) and then get back to work. Tuesday was different.

An undergrad - a woman with long curly hair in hipster/olsen twin garb sat down immediately next to me and started a very loud and clearly unimportant conversation. Nothign worng with unimportant loud cell phone conversations. I have many of them myself. Just not in computer labs where phones are banned. Perhaps I should have been more diplomatic than I was, but given her response, in retrospect, I really doubt it would have helped. In a slightly frustrated tone, I said, "You know, you really can't talk on the phone in here." This was an accurate claim. I've seen ITS employees say the same thing to offenders numerous times. The woman, not missing a beat or averting her eyes from her screen, said loudly and ina disgusted tone to whover was on the other end of her telephone conversation, "Ok, a pathetic person just told me to get off the phone. He thinks he runs the place."

I kinda did a Stephanie Tanner ("how rude") at this point, and was mildly shocked by the rudeness and self-centered nature of her response. I trieds to explain that this was the lab policy as i had seen it enforced and that I was not trying to be rude, but she did a non-verbal "talk to the hand" motion and hung up the phone.

Thankfully, not all NYU undergraduates are this spoiled and obnoxious - many of them are really great but it's the hipster ennui, the dissafected, post-gentriification sense of yuppie entitlement to urban space - which is certainly not unique to NYU students (although at Yale, there's much more of a technocrats of the future thing going on)- which i find so disconcerting.

Wish fulfilment

“The House of Delegates is a unique and potentially revolutionary structure
among institutions of higher education,” the statement said.

Actually, no, it isn't. It's a company union. There's nothing "revolutionary" about that.