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MEMORANDUM
March 17, 2008 |
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| To : |
Executive Council
Alternate Regional Vice-Presidents
Call Centre Locals |
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| From: |
Betty Bannon
National President |
RE: CALL CENTRE MEETING
As you are aware, pursuant to a resolution adopted by the September 2007 President’s Conference and the coincidental Executive Council meeting, a meeting of representatives of Locals with Call Centres has been scheduled for April 6, 2008. Much thought and planning has been invested in this meeting and the following objectives have been established for this meeting:
- To enable UTE to clearly identify and understand the issues facing our members employed in Call Centres.
- To identify what actions if any can be taken by UTE at the Local and/or Regional and/or National level to address these issues.
- To develop and implement a short term and long term plan of action for the Local, Regional and National levels of UTE to address these issues.
In order to meet these objectives and to prepare for this Call Centre meeting, our office has conducted a thorough analysis of the responses to the Call Centre questionnaire and to the written submissions received from some locals and members. As a result of this analysis, four (4) major themes have emerged:
- Hours of operation;
- Staffing;
- Pension benefits and pay; and
- Working conditions.
Consequently, we have decided to create workshops during our meeting to deal with each of these major themes. Our office will select the participants for each of the individual workshop to ensure a reasonable cross-sampling of locals and resources. Specific issues have been reported by respondents to the questionnaire or by individual submissions and have been identified as follows:
HOURS OF OPERATION
- Inadequate notice of changes to shift schedules.
- Difficulties for employees wishing to change shift.
- Family care, transportation and other similar factors are often affected by shift assignments.
- Employees with families are afforded greater consideration for shift selection than single employees.
- Students are afforded greater flexibility around scheduled shifts than other employees.
- There is lack of consultation concerning hours of work and shift assignment.
- Employees are forced to sometimes work evening shifts, weekend work and split shifts.
- There are insufficient rest and lunch periods.
- There are instances of reduction or increase in assigned hours without consultation.
STAFFING
- There is high staff turnover due to job dissatisfaction.
- The employer’s emphasis is on hiring part-time instead of full-time staff.
- The employer is reluctant to implement seasonal employment.
- Nepotism and favoritism are significant factors in staffing.
- Employees are applying for positions at a specific group and level, but are offered employment at a lower group and level.
- Standardized testing is being used in the rehire of term employees.
- Work samples by way of a test are being used for rehire.
- Little notice is provided to employees concerning term extensions.
- Students are often extended while experienced term employees are not extended.
- New term employees and students are often offered longer periods of employment than experienced term employees.
- Term employees are being denied other opportunities for employment as their managers are declaring them to be “not available”.
PENSION BENEFITS AND PAY
- Not all hours worked by employees are considered pensionable.
- Fluctuating weekly hours of work create inconsistencies with pay.
- Additional hours are processed on a separate check, resulting in higher withholding amounts.
- Employees are sometimes refusing additional hours in order to avoid pay problems.
- Fluctuating hours often result in overpayment and result in excessive recovery amounts.
- There are often delays in employees receiving their first paycheck.
- Two week hold-back of pay is unfair and unreasonable.
- Employees often experience delays in receiving their Records of Employment.
- Employees experience delays in benefit and pension coverage.
- Manager sometimes deliberately break service to disrupt employee benefit entitlement.
WORKING CONDITIONS
- Employees are often unable to take vacation at convenient times.
- Employees are often limited in the amount of vacation leave they can schedule.
- During certain periods, employees are unable to take any vacation leave.
- Employees are discouraged and sometimes penalized for using family related, sick and/or vacation leave and/or medical/dental appointments.
- Too much emphasis is placed on productivity (number of calls taken), rather than quality of work.
- Employees feel “chained” to their phones.
- Washroom breaks affect statistics and eligibility for rehire. Employees have to account for time away from phones.
- Monitoring of calls is stressful.
- Dealing with difficult and irate client is stressful.
- Working in an open office concept is noisy and disruptive.
- Inadequate training and very little or no time for reading updates is provided.
- Insufficient parking is available and public transportation is inadequate.
- Employees often experience health and safety problems associated with long periods restricted to a desk and use of a computer and keyboard.
In addition to the issues noted above, we also ask that you turn your mind to the questions which follow and be prepared to discuss them during the upcoming Call Centre meeting. The answers to these questions are essential to our identification of issues and the remedies to address these matters.
QUESTIONS
- What are the hours of operation of your Call Centre?
- Are part-time employees allowed flexible hours?
- What are the usual average hours of work for part-time employees?
- Is there a guarantee of minimum hours of work?
- How is it decided to whom and how hours of work will be offered?
- How flexible is management in accommodating employees’ requests for hours of work?
- Are any of your agents able to work a flexible or compressed work week?
- How are additional hours allocated to part-time agents? Are they being recorded as extra hours on their time report or is their original offer amended to include them?
- Is there a mandatory part-time employment?
- How many agents are required to work part-time and at what positions?
- Have employees experience problems requesting leave?
- When the late shift premium is paid, is it pensionable? Is it paid by supplementary cheque?
- Are any of your agents considered shift workers and receive the shift premium for hours worked between 4:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m.?
- How many persons are employed in your Call Centre?
- What percentage of these are permanent employees?
- What percentage are term employees?
- What percentage of employees is bilingual?
- What groups and levels of employees are employed in the Call Centre?
- What is the length of the average term of employment offered to term employees?
- Is there a Term Rehire/Recall process in place?
- Is testing for selection processes or rehire purposes done during non-working hours?
- Are your agents required to have Accounting or other educational requirements? If so, for what positions?
- Has your office experienced problems or delays in receiving forecasts and budgets from Headquarters?
- Have there been compensation problems? What kinds?
- If your members have not been properly paid, how long does it generally take before it is corrected?
- Do members receive sufficient information on benefits and insurances?
- Is performance monitored? How? By whom?
- Do you have silent monitoring or side-by-side monitoring?
- If your members participate in monitoring, do they receive proper feedback? Are the results used for performance evaluation? Who reviews the results?
- Does your office offer any special programs to promote wellness, to minimize stress, etc…?
- Do you have health or safety concerns or programs associated specifically with Call Centres?
- Do your members feel comfortable addressing their problems and issues with their managers or with their union representatives? Do they file grievances or do they suffer from fear or reprisal?
We recognize that the issues identified and the questions noted are voluminous. Notwithstanding this, in order to ensure that this Call Centre meeting is a success and to ensure that we may meaningfully address these pressing issues affecting some of our members, we ask for your usual cooperation in examining these issues in preparation for our meeting. We look forward to your views and opinions and thank you in advance for your assistance in this matter.
In Solidarity
Betty Bannon
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