The Customer Service Reps for Disney and Airbnb Who Have to Pay to Talk to You | Hacker News Reader

The Customer Service Reps for Disney and Airbnb Who Have to Pay to Talk to You

propublica.org

79 pointsdanso17 comments

Gig workers are going to become a larger part of the workdorce. Can't put the genie back in the bottle. Full time employment for the service sector will continue to go down. It's either this or outsourcing.

As of now benefits (health insurance, retirement benefits, unemployment etc.) are too tightly coupled to the employer and are very lopsided in terms of tax benefit. This is basically a legacy system from WW2 era.

Laws need to be updated to provide more rights to gig workers and benefits should be accessible in proportion to hours worked, preferably independent from the employer.

Ideally a contractor who works 10 hours a week should cost 25% of an FTE.

It's incredibly sad that deceptive low-paid work of this type 1) attracts workers and 2) is supported by the Supreme Court.

Well, there's been a long term strategy to make the Supreme Court business-friendly (pro-capital) and anti-labor: "The US supreme court may soon become plutocracy's greatest defender" https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/02/amy-co...

I think any work will attract workers as long as they need work. And the marketing was good enough to convince them that the payoff would be worth the initial outlay.

I get the complaint about deceiving uber and lyft drivers about the maintenance cost they are incurring by using their own vehicles, but what's the deception when it comes to people voluntarily working from home as a call center employee?

The article mentions that Arise overbooks contractors for corporate clients. The rationale is that Arise cannot dictate independent contractor hours directly, so by overbooking they can ensure sufficient labor for their clients at all hours. However, independent contractors are asked to pay for training material and complete unpaid training to be eligible for each client project. As a result, independent contractors may be getting systematically underpaid by holding the reasonable expectation of recouping their initial investment

They're legally not employees, yet are required to act like one - only paid for call time, yet required to be available for calls at times suiting the company.

Yah know, this is what it's like for a lot of businesses. A friend of mine runs a coffee shop. He only gets paid when a customer comes in the door-- and spends. If they look, he gets nothing.

There was a time when corporations were so flush with cash that they offered long term stability. That day is kind of over.

That's illegal for an employee. It's fine for an entrepreneur who chose to open a shop and is using a bank loan he can default on.

But he doesn't have someone a) charging him for training and b) dictating when he's available for business in a manner that suits their bottom line and not his, does he?

If these employees were truly independent contractors, that's fine, I have no qualms with that. What shits me to tears is when businesses claim an employee is an independent contractor when they're very much not able to be independent because of the demands of the company employing them.

> Client Support Professionals (CSPs) would work with Quality Assurance Performance Facilitators (QAPFs) in a Performance Enhancement Session (PES), or they might reach out to Chat Performance Facilitators or Escalation Performance Facilitators, and none would be an Arise employee, all would be independent contractors.

This is certainly something. Don't even know how to call it.

If support is a cost center, may as well make it a moat too.

It's a violation of US labor law, for one.

I'm amazed that they managed to make contact centre work even more stressful and even less rewarding.

Is that the kind of "naughtiness" Sam Altman looks for in a startup to invest in?

The whole thing is disappointing to see, but this bit was eye opening for me:

> One young woman in Florida said the same man would call on Saturday nights to say: “I can hear your typing. I really like the way you type.” Another longtime agent said she couldn’t believe how many “perverted calls” she had to field on Sunday mornings. “They’d say: ‘What are you wearing? Are you naked? Can I do things to you?’ I figured they got a thrill from skipping church.”

What the actual fuck, people? It is extremely creepy to call to sexually harass a customer service rep period, but to do it repeatedly is not only creepy, but it has to be extremely alarming to the customer service rep and I would hope violates some form of stalking laws.

The customer service reps are effectively powerless, doing degrading things to keep a minimum wage job. Then the employer mandates that they cannot hang up on a caller. The employer either refuses to remove harassing customers from the platform, or the customer service reps are too afraid that they'll be fired for reporting harassing customers to actually report them. And then along come the sexually harassing creeps, who derive sexual gratification from abusing the power imbalance created by the worker structure.

I'm sure it's a terrible idea with far-reaching and unpredictable consequences, but these companies presumably have account information on these people. It would make me extremely happy if Arise or the people that contract them would take a hard line and start releasing the names of people who sexually harass customer service agents, along with the "quality assurance" recording of the call.

It's always shitty when someone uses a power differential to abuse someone else, but I had always assumed that most of those occurrences in customer service were in the form of verbal abuse because the customer is frustrated by things that are out of the representative's control (e.g. Comcast sucks terribly, but your customer service rep can't fix that). It's shitty, and people shouldn't do it, but I can understand losing your patience when trying to navigate the quagmire that is Comcast policies. I never envisioned that someone would _go out of their way_ to harass customer service reps, especially in a sexual sense.

The world might be a better place if the "quality assurance recording" cut both ways, and the rep could flag you as an asshole or a creep to everyone the same way you can flag a rep to their employer.

If interested, Anne Case and Angus Deaton talk about the history of these types of services, and its impact on workers, when citing the issue of “domestic outsourcing”: https://www.chronicle.com/article/anatomists-of-melancholy-i...

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