LABOUR-CANADA: Harsh Working Conditions Suck the Glamour Out of Internet Jobs

By Paul Weinberg Reprint | | Print |

Paul Weinberg

TORONTO, Mar 26 2000 (IPS) - Those dream jobs on the Internet may appear glamorous to those on the outside, but the long hours and low pay have many e-commerce workers wondering if things weren’t better on the old factory floor.

Consider the testimony of a former technical support worker with the Toronto-based Internet Service Provider Interlog, which in 1998 was itself gobbled up by the larger, US-based PSINet.

He says he was attracted to Internet work by innovations like the offer of “stock options”. A stock option is a payment to employees in the form of shares in the company, rather than cash. It is a huge carrot for high-tech employees, because of the widespread stories in the business about secretaries and support workers with stock options becoming millionaires after their companies struck gold.

But this former Interlog worker did not win the stock option lottery. Instead, holding stock options merely persuaded him to put up with low pay and long hours. He started off earning 14,000 US dollars, which eventually went up to 19,000 dollars. In Canada technical support and call centre workers start at a minimum wage of between 8.50 and 10 US dollars an hour, according to a Canadian labour movement source.

The former Interlog technical support employee sometimes worked 16 hours a day in “hairy” situations, helping to maintain network operations and snuff out glitches and breakdowns. “The deal at Interlog was that it was more of a learning experience,” he says. His story is not unusual.

The crazy pace of tight deadlines and intense work – which a recent British-led survey of 1,000 employees in each of the European Union countries says is twice as likely to cause heart disease – is central to the operation of new Internet start-up companies.

According to Bill Lessard, co-author of ‘Net Slaves: True Tales of Working the Web’, published by McGraw Hill, most people who dream of getting rich through an Internet start-up do not realize that nine out of 10 of these companies fail.

He says too that companies that are engaged in round-the-clock software development naturally seek younger employees with the drive, energy, lack of family commitments and most importantly, “foolishness”.

Lessard, a former temporary worker for Prodigy, the precursor to America Online, cites one Internet start-up where the meals are catered three times a day and bunk beds are stationed beside the cubicles, so the employees do not have to leave their building. Inside, it’s like barging into a messy university student residence with pizza boxes strewn on the floor, he says.

“You are working for some 23 or 24 year old a lot of the time, at least in the early stages, who doesn’t know anything about time management,” he adds.

What is the impact on people working harder and harder than ever? Health problems include fatigue, back aches, stomach pains, headaches, allergies, sleeping difficulties, ear and eye problems and ultimately heart disease, says Dr. Brendan Burchell, the Cambridge University social and political sciences lecturer in charge of the European Survey on Working Conditions.

“Overwork is a major cause of sickness,” he notes.

But those unable to operate “on Internet speed” and respond to problems on the fly need not apply, at Chapters Online, for instance, says its director of human resources Andy Labute.

The grand daddy of all the online retailers and prototype model for electronic commerce, Amazon.com, was accused last November in the Washington Post of tolerating sweatshop working conditions for its customer service representatives.

The way it has responded to an overload of email messages has been to forbid its representatives from handling less than 7.5 emails an hour, if they want to keep their jobs. They are actively discouraged from spending any significant time on the telephone with customers dealing with the status of a particular order.

All this sounds very familiar to Victor Morden, national representative and organiser for the Communications, Energy and Paper Workers Union of Canada (CEP), which is currently attempting to organise the generally un-unionised call centres and information technology workers in Canada.

While the majority of calls that he receives come from unhappy call centre workers in the cable and telecommunications industries who believe their bosses have set unrealistic productivity goals, he believes that the situation is probably worse in the Internet sector.

“The more technology there is, the more statistics there are for the employer to look at.”

Already in the call centres that Morden has investigated, customer service representatives are electronically measured for the length of stay on the telephone and how much time they spend going through their email and voice mail.

But at the same time, they also are generally expected to sell on the telephone, which means their conversations cannot be too brief either. That leaves them quite vulnerable.

“The group leader can call you in and say you are not meeting the objective. They always pick on the senior people who are earning higher wages and have more benefits,” he says.

So what does the recent spate of mergers mean for employment in the brave new world of high tech? Will there be more opportunities and creative challenges? Or just more stress and strain?

According to employees, after Interlog was bought by PSINet, the most direct effect was that they were called down to a Toronto hotel and divided into two groups – where the larger one was summarily fired.

For Ottawa-based PSINet executive Kathy Adams, the dismissals were a regrettable move designed “to improve customer service”. Yet for employees they were proof that the wire-head businesses can be every bit as ruthless as their industrial-age counterparts.