The petri dish and Russian roulette’: Working in the contact centre during the Covid-19 pandemic - Professor Phil Taylor
Event Date: 17 March 2021
Speaker: Professor Phil Taylor, Department of Work, Employment & Organisation, University of Strathclyde Business School
Time: 2-3pm
Location: please contact Debbie Campbell d.campbell@strath.ac.uk for details
The Covid-19 pandemic exemplifies the ontological truth that every domain in the world in connected to every other. If SARS-CoV-2, the zoonotic pathogen that causes the disease Covid-19, was spread through global circuits of production and travel, its differential rates of morbidity and mortality are contingent on multiple interrelated factors at national, regional, local and community scales. Within the matrix of epidemiological transmission and prevention, the spheres of work and employment, and particularly the workplace in its assemblage of potentially vulnerable bodies, is important. In addition to obvious hazards in ‘front-line’ workplaces, particular environments have been identified as major sites of risk. Contact/call centres have been the loci of multiple outbreaks, the most egregious being the DVLA in Swansea that had over 500 positive cases between September-December 2020. This paper asks, first, what are the characteristics of the contact/call centre that might make call-handlers particularly susceptible to infection? Answering the question why the call centre and its built environment constitute a ‘structure of vulnerability’ (Nichols, 1997) compels us to understand the routes of the virus’ transmissibility (e.g. Bourouiba, 2020; Morawska and Milton, 2020) and then to re-engage with established knowledge and recent research on its distinctive organisational form inspired by labour process theory. An holistic model of office occupational health, integrating proximate, ambient and social environment elements (Taylor et al, 2003) informs the research instrument – an on-line survey of call-handlers in (largely) telecommunications and financial services – and data analysis. Between April and June 2020, 2,226 completed surveys were obtained containing, additionally, 200,000 words of testimony in answer to open questions. The evidence emphatically demonstrates that a combination of compromised social distancing, sub-optimal cleansing regimes, problematic air quality and ventilation combined with managerial practices and spatial characteristics of the built environment cause a toxic mix - a petri dish of contamination, which contributes to high rates of infection.
Published: 17 March 2021
