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Organizing the “Eyes and Ears of Corporate Capitalism”: Worker Inquiry and Labour Resistance in New Zealand’s Call Centres
Last modified: 2011-06-30
Abstract
The “creative class” hype has tended to obscure some of the fastest-growing forms of employment within the political economy of what social theorist Jodi Dean has called “communicative capitalism,” a regime which feeds on the proliferation of “communicative access and opportunity.” Emerging in the 1980s and exploding in the 1990s, call centres have rapidly become an integral part of the global economy. These factories of communication, where knowledge, language and affect are put to work, increasingly mediate relations with the institutions in our lives. For the millions who toil in them, they tend to include a well-established mixture of high stress, low wages, precarious employment, disciplinary management, draining emotional labour, and pervasive electronic surveillance. Avoiding prevailing depictions of call centre employment as either an emancipated form of “knowledge work” or a hopeless form of labour subjection, this paper presents the findings of an ongoing international research project into emergent forms of labour resistance and organizing within call centres. Specifically, it introduces the autonomist marxist method of the worker inquiry, and reports on research into the “Calling for Change” campaign organized by call centre workers in Auckland through the Unite union.