Resistance and accommodation in call centres : towards collective awareness

This paper explores employee responses to temporal and numerical flexibility at three Australian call centres. Some workers accommodated flexible working hours by reducing their hours of work, swapping shifts, and calling upon family members to provide childcare. On occasion they were able to take advantage of the quieter 'doggo' shifts to lessen work intensity and interact with workmates. At one site, the payment of penalty rates was a significant contributor to accommodation of shift work. But employees also resisted flexibility. They called in sick for shifts they did not wish to work, used the rhetoric of flexibility to criticise management decisions, and joined unions. The story is not solely one of resistance or accommodation. The paper traces the development and interplay between resistance and accommodation and the transition from individual grievance to collective awareness. It examines the impact of management actions that offended widely held values of dignity, fairness, and autonomy and employee perceptions of how they deserved to be treated. In so doing, it suggests that these concerns present real opportunities for unions to galvanise and organise call centre workers.