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> We had to be in Avail status at the exact start of our shift or be counted late. For example, if I was scheduled to be in at 10am, I had to be in Avail at 10am. Meaning I had to take care of booting up computer, etc. before then.

I won over 2k from a class-action lawsuit over this exact thing about a decade ago. This is not legal.

Legal or not, this is not the way a human should treat another. I suppose this is what happens when the one and only goal is profit - Amazon delivery drivers peeing in bottles in their trucks comes to mind ...

(Amazon employee but not doing anything related to deliveries)

UPS drivers pee in bottles while out delivering, too.

In another life I worked facilities at a UPS distribution center and my team would have to pick up those bottles :-/

When yah gotta go, yah gotta go.

Is it possible that they did this because there's just no easy access to restrooms like being stuck in traffic?

I have friends who have done this when they were stuck in traffic.

I imagine that when UPS drivers do their deliveries like in the suburbs, there might not be public restrooms nearby.

Logical explanation!

In reality, like always, it's a mix of both - meeting delivery deadlines, and meeting nature-call deadlines.

I 100% agree on the "this is not how humans treat humans". This sort of thing is what comes up when you can only be measured by numbers. And someone four levels above you says the numbers need to improve by 2%. At that point you ar a number, or at least they are treating you as your output, not as a human.

> they are treating you as your output, not as a human.

In the context of an employer monitoring employee toilet breaks, this is perversely amusing.

Higher ups might not even see that number, they see avail time divided by paid time, and they want to push "efficiency" up.

What's not legal? Requiring that a worker be at their desk at a certain time? Doubt it. Now if they're not getting paid for the time when they're setting up, I agree that's probably not legal.

> According to the regulations interpreting the FLSA, “a stenographer who reads a book while waiting for dictation, a messenger who works a crossword puzzle while awaiting assignments, [a] fireman who plays checkers while waiting for alarms and a factory worker who talks to his fellow employees while waiting for machinery to be repaired are all working during their periods of inactivity.” Since these employees are unable to effectively use the time spent waiting for their own purposes, the time essentially belongs to and is controlled by the employer. Accordingly, in all of these examples, the time spent waiting is an integral part of the job. As such, the employees are engaged to wait, and are therefore entitled to be compensated for their time.

https://www.thehumanequation.com/en/news_rss/articles/2010/w...

I don't know if that is still true

https://slate.com/business/2014/12/supreme-court-rules-again...

I think this is maybe the most egregious instance of this, can’t imagine how this case was decided the wrong way.

How about compiling software? https://xkcd.com/303/

Yes that's the issue, if your shift starts at 10am it means you start working at 10am, and setup is part of your work.

> What's not legal?

If nothing else, I think the part where you are expected to start working before you start getting paid sounds pretty sketchy.

You are your desk at the start time. But if you need to turn on your computer, log in the the system, start things...

Even more than that, the clock starts when you walk through the front door (portal to portal). If the travel time to the actual work site is long, such as a very large campus, or a miner's trip from the mine entrance to the active dig site, then that is time that should be on the clock.

"Scheduled to be in at 10am" implies "paid from 10am" to me.

True, but that also means that you should not expect an employee to be productive immediately at 10am. "Paid from 10am" means that the expectation is to be walking in the door at 10am, on average. If you want the employee to be set up by 10am, that costs extra.

"We had to be in Avail status at the exact start of our shift or be counted late. For example, if I was scheduled to be in at 10am, I had to be in Avail at 10am. Meaning I had to take care of booting up computer, etc. before then."

This has wage and hour lawsuit written all over it. See "donning and doffing" litigation.

It really depends if they were only paid starting at 10am or if it was just an (extremely shitty) strict start time and if they're salaried or if hourly were being paid for that time. It's not clear from their post if it would be one or the other.

Sure. I'm assuming that people doing those kinds of jobs, working under those kinds of rules, are highly likely to be hourly and not salaried employees.

Yeah and as crappy as it is it being illegal depends entirely on if the employer paid them for the time spent setting up their work station to be 'Available' by 10AM sharp. It only becomes illegal if they're only paying them starting at 10AM when they become available.

Being paid from 10AM to whenever is exactly what the OP implied. They were not paid for setup time as far as I can tell from that text. Are you able to glean more?

> We had to be in Avail status at the exact start of our shift or be counted late. For example, if I was scheduled to be in at 10am, I had to be in Avail at 10am. Meaning I had to take care of booting up computer, etc. before then.

Reminds me of the work I did for a major car company in sub-manufacturing.

We had to be at our stations by the time our shift-start buzzer went, with the machine running. Machine status was logged and visible on displays from every corner of the plant so there was no slipping in a minute late. A second late meant 15 minutes docked pay. Keeping in mind the trip from the locker room to many of the stations in my department took several minutes to walk.

Similarly for breaks—the machine had to run until the break buzzer, then you had to lock everything down for safety, record your numbers, then walk to the break room if you wanted a snack, a smoke—whatever. You also had to be back, machine spun up and running by the time the buzzer went for the end of the break. The breaks were 10 minutes long, and lunch was 20. In reality, if you were quick, you got about five minutes of your break and about 10-15 of your lunch. (Also keeping in mind the work was dirty and potentially poisonous so you had to be sure to wash thoroughly before eating anything).

These stringent rules resulted in many shouting matches between some of the management and a few staff members. It also resulted in a big campaign by the CAW (Canadian Auto Workers union) which in turn resulted in a propaganda campaign by the company and threats of shutting down to move. This plant also paid a good $10 an hour less than their unionized counterparts and competitors. Thankfully, we did have good supportive supervisors—the smallest of buffers.

Don't get me started on the quotas and their arbitrary increases to beyond the machine's production capacity...

FWIW: The larger company has a good reputation—their subsidiaries, however, were different.

Pretty easy to see why they pressed back so hard against unionizing. Pretty much everything you talked about is the sort of thing a Union would squash.

Definitely. And exactly why it was unhappy employees who contacted the CAW in the first place.

I suspect they were also worried it would bubble up to the namesake auto company who has been successful at keeping the unions out for decades now.

Fun fact: The CAW tried to unionize a call center I worked at once. At the time, I was pretty confused.

I have read so much about this kind of controlling behaviour and at times experienced it during summer jobs. But I have a question.

Why do they do this?

When it comes to the worst elements of "bottom-line obsessed thinking", I can't think of better examples than large national call centers; and their leaders will use all sorts of borderline abusive management tactics to justify it.

I started my career in one for a popular multi-national consumer electronics brand whose devices might be in your pocket right now, also as a T-1 IT person for about four years.

It's soul draining. One thing I'll never forget were the amount of EMS visits we got due to people having heart-attacks. Young people too.

That's what just doesn't make any sense. A single on-site heart attack has got to undo months of trying to shave off seconds here and there and abusing people to get just a few more minutes of output per day. Not to mention the huge loss when it comes to turn over.

There may have been other factors. Like being yelled at by unhappy customers all day.

Mostly contracts. All the numbers the individual employee is being held to, the managers are being held to in aggregate. Then the client holds the call center company to those numbers in aggregate. Somewhere in there, the call center company is trying to squeeze out a bit of profit.

Source - I wrote internal software for a large call center outsourcing company right out of college. Back then the company I was a part of was actually pretty progressive. They let employees work split schedules, WFH way before it was cool, factored in things like reasonable breaks, etc...

The amount of data that comes off of automated dialers and inbound CMS systems can make for fun tech work, but it's still a pretty crummy industry which is why I left.

When I was first coming out of college interviewing I got a tiny taste of it interviewing for a company that made software for controlling and analyzing the performance of a call center and one of the weird sideways things they talked about doing was automatically dropping some calls to help call centers meet their metrics because a call sitting in a queue forever might mess up their wait time stats but dropping it and the person calling back let operators hit the reset button on the timer.

Oh, I once worked at a place with a similar system. If they waited long enough in the queue, their call would get disconnected (hopefully they heard a message saying to call later) and a counter went up for the number of times that it happened. I think you needed to wait at least 30 minutes for it to happen.

Thankfully most of the time the queue wasn't ever ridiculously long (10 minutes wait time at probably the 95th percentile) customers, with 3-50 agents available depending on the previous year's traffic.

It was a good environment for a high school student. When it got super busy no one in the office was above getting on the phones.

So I guess at that point "wait time" just becomes a vanity metric? Or to show their clients "we only make callers wait X amount of time compared to our competitors"?

I think it does become a vanity metric at that point at least in terms of actually successfully improving customer experience. For their clients though it was an extremely valuable thing to be able to game because it could determine if they made a bonus payment or not.

There's the old adage that as soon as a metric becomes a goal it ceases to be a good metric because it starts to be gamed. It's probably not universally true but it shows up again and again in things like NYC's COMPSTAT program where a decent idea becomes a goal without measuring the right thing and you wind up with police just harassing people because you've gotta get the number of arrests up or you'll look bad at the next COMPSTAT review.

Manage one of those sorts of places for a week and you'll figure it out. It isn't all just being a jerk for being a jerk's sake.

There's a reason why you experienced it at "summer jobs", too.

Could you describe the reasons for those of us who don't want to manage one of such places for fear of losing their humanity?

Well there are people who are, you know, less responsible than others, who will also tend to be correlated to the lower-pay employees. If you, say, had the bright idea of starting an "ethical" call center that didn't track when people came in, and since you'll be pulling from the same pool because it's not like you can afford to pay call center employees $30/hr, and you decide "I'm not going to track anyone's time!"...

well, frankly, the obvious is going to happen. You're going to get people outright lying to you about being present. It won't take long before you start tracking time.

And so on for most of the other practices there.

But jerf...

I'm only talking about the other side of the complex of forces that inevitably emerges from this sort of low pay situation. It doesn't mean that employees ought to be treated as subhumans, obviously. Another aspect is that this sort of control will also attract management who enjoys wielding that sort of power. Management isn't guilty. But these restrictions are all generally reactions to the problems management had getting their employees to show up on time. There's a whole back and forth of events that inevitably occurs at scale, which is why the whole job has a bad rep, not just particular companies. The same forces produce convergent evolution between all the companies that have large call centers.

You'll get similar experience managing a McDonalds, or any number of other places where you're trying to get a whole bunch of low-paid people doing a particular job.

Thanks for explaining the dynamics of these jobs so clearly.

So when you say, "It isn't all just being a jerk for being a jerk's sake.", you essentially mean that everyone involved is a victim of the circumstances? That these jobs naturally attract certain types of people on both employee and management side, trap them, and pit them against each other?

Yes. Swathes of low paid jobs are like this.

You're trying to motivate people who really aren't getting much out of the deal. The "managers" are still earning biscuits.

Everyone I know who works in retail, for example, seems to be stuck in a sick system hellscape. If you win, you still lose because the "best job" in a store is still only realistically suitable for a teenager.

Those circumstances don't come out of thin air. In the end, there are specific people who explicitly create them, and profit off them.

Also, I don't think that "those places attract a certain type of managers" is much of an excuse for those managers.

I typo'ed. I said "management isn't guilty" but I meant to type "management isn't guilt-free".

I also agree that there people who profit, but I encourage you to see that as part of the dynamics rather than an exceptional case that somehow happens every time. It is perfectly predictable that people who will try to profit from this will enter the system, in ways both monetary and psychological. It's merely the n'th step, not some sort of surprise.

In an oversimplification, there are two means to motivate people; the proverbial carrot and stick.

Call centers (and most low paying jobs) operate with a goal of minimizing costs. Most incarnations of motivating people with a carrot involve spending money on bonuses for performance, raises, etc. So those can't be implemented because it would raise costs. Another option for the carrot is promotions, but my impression is that there isn't a lot of upward mobility in call centers; at least not of the variety that eventually gets you out of the call center.

So once all your options for motivating people with carrots are gone, you end up with the stick. And this is what it looks like when your only motivation option is the stick.

You could probably operate a call center that handles calls as quickly using bonuses and such, but you would be more expensive. You'd have the benefit of having happier employees, but that's not a thing businesses are willing to expend money on. And even if you did, some enterprising soul in a few years would propose eliminating the carrots to save money and youd be back to square one.

It also doesn't help that most of these workers also lack a lot of other employment opportunities. In tech, for instance, it's hard to run a shop using sticks instead of carrots because your workers have plenty of other potential employers. They'll just quit.

In my experience in call centers it usually breaks down into 2 causes coming together 1) Support is viewed as cost centers so "maximizing" efficiency becomes important to the executives in charge of it 2) Customers have very high expectations around what is an acceptable amount of time to wait to talk to an agent. Because of reason 1, things are optimized so tightly that a shockingly small amount of variation can cause really large shifts in wait times. As an example, I once worked for a cable company that averaged ~2,000 agents during peak call times. Every once in a while an office would have an unannounced fire drill, taking about 200 agents offline. When that happened wait times would go from about 90 seconds to over 10 minutes for the hour or two

But suddenly having 10% less workers is not a shockingly small amount I think.

I believe it is more about general "efficiency" or milking of the workers. How to get the most while spending the least. Which is a working principle, but does have dark side effects, when we are talking about human ressources.

Contracts I think. The place I was working for probably had a contract that incurred penalties from the client if certain metrics weren't met.

CompuCom, this shit is definitely CompuCom. If that's not what you're talking about, well, I experienced all of this there too.

As a former Compucom slave, I can also confirm.

I know multiple people who've worked there, and they've never had a single good thing to say about the company.

Not CompuCom but experienced the exact same

Sounds exactly like my time at Gap Store Support down to the letter. ACW was limited to 1 minutes per call, and eventually you had to have approval for ACW, especially during busy hours. Bathroom breaks had to be when it was dead and no more than 10 minutes in a day. Had to be told when you could take a lunch or break based on call volume. RONA was basically an automatic write-up, made that mistake when going to lunch and not hitting the Lunch button.

This paints an accurate and appropriately frightening picture of what a call center is like when it's busy, but it can be worse when it's not. For example, one call center I worked in prohibited any kind of reading or talking to others while waiting for a call. You were just supposed to sit there. Sometimes for hours. Staring forward. Waiting.

Oh, I and I do mean sit there. You weren't supposed to stand, either. No pacing at your desk or even just standing still. You were supposed to remain seated, whether on a call or not.

>Definitely a rough environment, but it wasn't as bad as it sounded

Not as bad as hell on earth is still really really bad.

Uh, that reminds me of a dark dark time in my life.

I'm glad it's over and will forever curse those bastards that inflicted it on us.

Nope. "we weren't infected by the SF attitude" was not a correct description, we were just mobbed into submission.

Christ, it's been years...