Selling Human Services: Public Sector Rationalisation and the Call Centre Labour Process

By Diane van den Broek

The experiences of professional employees in a public sector call centre shows that managerialism rules, underscoring deskilling and work intensification, aspects of call centre work that professional employees seek to break out of.

Van den Broek took a call centre that was not focussed on sales but on human services, in particular professional operators who dealt with child protection issues.. The operators has d strong occupational and professional identity but this was undermined by the managerialist approach of the call centre.

(Australian Bulletin of Labour. vol. 29, no. 3, September 2003)