FLMUniti: countrywide strike in call centers of telecom italia
text in german
(beginning of october 2001) Telecom Italia is cutting jobs and re-locating others. Furthermore, new working hours and a new organisation of work is being introduced, in particular for the "online"-departments, which show themselves as another attack on the "dignity" of workers through technological control, the despotism of the "responsibles", etc. All this with the aim to cut down the number of jobs and introduce more precarious and flexible work. Therefore, it is necessary to continue the mobilisa tion against the contract and agreements which were signed by the Cgil-Cisl-Uil-Fialtel. This is, because the "restructuring" at Telecom with the aim of "flexibilisation" and "precarisation" refers to that (contract) and therefore is legitimate.
In order to put up a resistance against these processes and fight through more "human" conditions of work, the base union FLMU-CUB asks all workers of the departments 12, 182, 183, 187, 189 Data.com, 189 Rete, 191, CRU, CNA-Data.com and CN-ATI (whether front-end of back-office) to take part in the strike at the 15th of October.
- Against precarisation and flexibilisation
- Against the re-location and out-sourcing of work and workers
- Against the new working hours and the organisation "modell call center"
- The jobs have to remain on the local level
- For more human conditions of work and the ability to swap shifts
- For the compliance with the health- and security-norms
That the restructuring is aiming to put workers under pressure to force them to leave the job "volontarily" is not even being denied: the company document on the "new organisation of customer care" (July 2001) names as fundamental points the creation of a single profile for call center-employees through the implementation of the CRM-system, "that permits the valorisation of the operative results and the following improvement of the saleability on the market". By the way, the workers in these sectors now exactly what stands behind this formula of the "valorisation of the operative results": the speed up of the work rhythm, lousy working- and shift-hours, that are the reason for increased stress, because the whole existance of a person is subjected to the demands of work; tough controls and individual conditioning; controls "minute per minute" through operative systems, which for each worker record the number of calls, the duration of calls, the breaks, the "performance", combined with direct "physical" control on the work place. Other for the "model call center" typical conditions of work are: sale targets that are impossible to reach, restrictions and prohibitions up to the limits of respect for personal freedom, control of the work activity, of the state of mind, of the "motivation", demand for total - mental and physical - consent and concentration of the "whole attention" to Telecom.
For these reasons we ask the workers to fight against the reorganisation of work, to boycott the logic of exploitation of this new organisation of work, to take part in the strike at Telecom call centers and to take further the confrontation of the affected workers of this "new" work, which also seems to become a big struggle of civilisation.
Federazione Lavoratori Metalmeccanici Uniti - Confederazione Unitaria di Base
Firenze, Via Nazionale 57. Tel./fax 055/494858. email: flmufi@dada.it
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