New Book Explores How CWA Service Reps Battled For Quality Jobs in their Call Centers

During her career, former CWA Research Director Debbie Goldman saw, firsthand, how telecom companies moved to employ technology in increasingly hostile ways for call center workers. In her new book titled “Disconnected: Call Center Workers Fight for Good Jobs in the Digital Age,” Goldman explores the struggle of CWA customer service reps, mostly women, who mobilized to limit abusive surveillance, speed-up, and outsourcing of their work as their employers joined the race to the bottom in the years after the 1984 break-up of the Bell system.

In 1992, on a research tour of a New Jersey Bell call center (what would later become Verizon Communications), CWA local president Hazel Dellavia introduced Goldman to the new automatic call distributor (ACD) technology, which not only distributed calls but gave detailed reports of worker productivity in a dizzying array of metrics. Revolutionary at the time, these devices and the data they generate have become standard equipment for most call centers across the country.

Goldman writes, “I was appalled, anticipating the ways management would use the data to intensify surveillance, speed up the pace of work, increase sales quotas, and enhance control over the way the service representatives did their jobs. This was a stress epidemic in the making.”

Read a detailed history of this struggle, from 1992 to today, as Goldman deftly weaves public and union records with the stories of more than 35 feisty, creative CWA-represented service rep leaders, activists, and organizers. She gives in-depth detail on how CWA and its call center members mobilized to win impressive victories at the bargaining table through contract enforcement, labor-management initiatives, organizing, and striking. A must-read for today’s workers, activists, and organizers who continue to struggle with management for control in the workplace and in the halls of power for pro-worker policy.

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