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Comment by anothernewdude | Hacker News Reader

What a waste of money. If the markets were efficient these places would go out of business.

Indeed. Why is it not enough to monitor the actual calls going through the system?

Presumably because the employer wants to intimidate the workers to extract more. Once an employee is surveilled, an unscrupulous boss gains all sorts of leverage that can be applied in all sorts of ways.

Efficient or not, call center agent supply exceeds demand. There’re millions of liberal arts graduates who don’t have anywhere else to work.

The cited workers in the article are in Colombia and Albania. I somewhat doubt they're liberal arts graduates or competing with liberal arts graduates. They're competing with whatever next recently failed war-torn state can produce enough passable English speakers once their own country starts to develop a real middle class that can demand things like not having surveillance cameras installed in their houses by their employers.

So, you're saying a high labour supply justifies home surveillance of workers as well as their their families?

You’re putting words in my mouth, don’t do that. I just explained why workforce oversupply gives employers the possibility to do things they do.

I didn't intend to put words in your mouth. That was simply how I read it, and I asked for a confirmation. Thank you for clarifying.

Usage of the word "justify" implies that there's some objective "just" level of work relations that we can deduce that would be fair for everyone. I don't think that this universality exists.

Some people are okay with this, some are not. Some companies want this, some do not. There are plenty of different employees and employers out there, and they can balance their respective wishes on a free market.

The kind of people that end up working in the kinds of call centers that do these activities are not the kind of people that experience a "free market" of employment. They're abused because they are unable to work elsewhere, so they tolerate it, no matter how soul wrenching it is, because they need money to live.

Working at a call center is akin to emergency medical care, but for financial surviving.

Why are they unable to work else where?

I worked for a call center for a few years, first job once I was done with school. A lot of the people who were hired were simply shipped in by the local unemployment agency. After being unemployed for X days, the government simply offered to pay parts of their salaries for six months as a means to stimulate local employers to hiring more people.

The result was that various firms like Teleperformance and the like placed call centres in areas of high unemployment, and thousands of people were put on the phone lines with insufficient training, made to work under sub-par conditions for six months, before getting promptly sacked for arbitrary reasons just before their probation period was over.

These are just businesses abusing the system. Not accepting the job offers would have meant financial ruin. The people who are subjected to this usually have no other options available, and they're then run into the ground and promptly discarded once they were no longer useful.

Call centers (in Central America at least) are the most readily available jobs that allow the worker to achieve a middle class lifestlye.

Their entry level positions require only a High School degree and fluent English. And pay more than what a Master Degree could earn in other companies.

For example, in El Salvador they pay twice than other jobs, always comply with overtime and night working hours payment rules, offer English improvement classes, University compensation, and offer private medical insurance as a benefit. This benefits are higher than what most small/mid businesses can offer.

Employees don't have much choice, faced with the decision of turning on a webcam for a $800+ per month job + benefits, or working in another job for minimum wage for $340 per month (and working on site under CCTV)

> They're abused because they are unable to work elsewhere

That's absurd. Even if you make a (false) claim that they're only able to work at a call center and all other professions are closed to them, there are many different call centers that all compete for the same labour.

> Working at a call center is akin to emergency medical care, but for financial surviving.

If you want to provide care, you can do it. I do it myself. But it's completely immoral to put it as a responsibility on somebody who just buys these people's services. When you go to buy groceries, you don't suddenly become ethically responsible for the grocer's financial situation, do you?

> Even if you make a (false) claim that they're only able to work at a call center and all other professions are closed to them, there are many different call centers that all compete for the same labour.

To be fair, being call center agent sucks in many places. Maybe you don’t get a camera installed in your home, but breaks are short, shifts are long and you get 5 minutes to eat lunch.

You can always go work for Amazon at the warehouse. But I’ve heard it’s not that great either.

That's absolutely true, but that's not some nefarious agent being evil. That's just society as a whole not assigning a lot of value to unskilled labour.

What kind of wish balancing can take place between me and an ant, if my wish is to squish it?

Labour law exists for a reason, and it changes over time for a reason. The fact that there is no single absolute truth does not imply that we should not be setting limits.

It’s not because they have a liberal arts degree, it’s also because their hobbies are not technically valuable to anyone. I hold a philosophy degree but I have been obsessed with computers my whole life and learned to code before I had any intention of doing it for a living which is what I do now. Too many people think school is the only way to do anything. That may have been true but now there are very few fields you cannot learn the information side of simply by spending time watching videos on the internet.

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