Years ago, I took a job at a call center. These jobs paid, on average at the time, about 10 dollars an hour. Which was more than minimum wage, but not by much.

Jobs other than call center work for under educated, under experienced people in my city were really hard to find. The good employers were almost never hiring, hired from within, and outsourced the entry level stuff. The vast majority of available jobs to myself and ultimately the other 300 people that ended up going through that particular call center were customer service roles.

That industry is notoriously difficult to break out of. You’d say ‘just go find a different job.’ and yeah that’s good in theory. But everyone working those jobs is always looking for another job. No one takes a call center job and isn’t thinking about getting a better job. If those jobs were readily available, call center staff simply wouldn’t exist. These are jobs of last resort. A step up from flipping burgers.

The pay is barely enough to afford rent and groceries. That was years ago, it’s probably much worse now. I had roommates. Without them I wouldn’t have been able to afford much other than going to work and back and feeding myself, nevermind driving all over town trying to find another job.

Thing is at these jobs you’re infinitely replaceable. As desperate as you were when you took it, there are ten other people behind you, just as if not more desperate for work. They will literally hire people off the street and throw them in training within a day.

So not only can you not afford to lose this job, you can’t afford to speak up at this job. You can’t unionize, because mentioning it will get you fired on the spot, you can’t speak up about abusive situations, because HR will simply fire you. You can’t even report illegal practices.

So on to this particular call center job. This was basically just filling mail order prescriptions. Theoretically people would call in, tell someone what they’d needed, we’d click a few buttons and in a week they’d have a 90 day supply.

That’s not what happened. 95% of the calls we received were problems. Most of the day was spent either being screamed at, or pleaded with, with none of the tools we needed to actually address these problems. To add to this, we were constantly watched by management. Quality, supervisors, auditors, trainers, you name it. If they weren’t taking calls they were listening to calls. My record was 3 simultaneous people listening in to a single phone call while it was happening but I heard of more. Any deviation from our very strict rules meant immediate and swift correction from everyone that heard about it, every time they heard about it. That was the only feedback.

Because we were not trained for the type of work we were doing, this negative feedback was constant.

Add to that, they gave us a really bizarre schedule. No one started at the same time every day. No one had two days off in a row. You might start at 11 am one day and 630 am next. You can imagine, bathroom breaks were also tightly monitored and yes, more than one woman was fired because they were pregnant and peed too frequently.

All of this is to just provide some context you apparently sorely need.

I found more than one suicide note at that job. Generally hidden under keyboards. I know at least one woman did commit suicide while employed there, two others that committed suicide in the years following, still working similar jobs.

It’s important to know how trapped these jobs make you feel. Not only are you rarely ever actually able to help anyone, the company you’re working for is actively making shitty business decisions and counting on you to smooth it over for them. Your managers are under pressure to keep your call times low and your answered calls high, and that shit rolls down hill. You can’t just quit, you can’t easily find a different job, you can’t afford to do anything other than work and sleep.

So no, it’s not a dictatorship. But that’s not the fucking problem.