Sign-In
Cart
Disconnected: Call Center Workers Fight for Good Jobs in the Digital Age
Paperback
Series: Working Class in American History
LaborGeneral ReferenceTechnology & Engineering
Currently unavailable to order
Please enter your email and a message will be sent to you when this product becomes available on our website.
ISBN13: 9780252088155
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: Aug 20 2024
Pages: 264
Weight: 0.93
Height: 0.78 Width: 6.06 Depth: 8.98
Language: English
Call center employees once blended skill and emotional intelligence to solve customer problems while the workplace itself encouraged camaraderie and job satisfaction. Ten years after telecom industry deregulation, management had isolated the largely female workforce in cubicles, imposed quotas to sell products, and installed surveillance systems that tracked every call and keystroke.
Debbie J. Goldman explores how call center employees and their union fought for good, humane jobs in the face of degraded working conditions and lowered wages. As the workforce coalesced to resist the changes, it demanded the Communications Workers of America (CWA) fight for safe and secure good-paying jobs. But trends in technology, capitalism, and corporate governance--combined with the decline of unions--narrowed the negotiating options for workers. Goldman describes how the actions of workers, management, and policymakers shaped the social impact of the new digital technologies and gave new form to the telecommunications industry in a time of momentous change.
Perceptive and nuanced, Disconnected tells an overlooked story of service workers in a time of change.
Also in
Labor
Cleanup on Aisle Five: Essential Work, Poverty Wages, and the View from Behind the Supermarket Register
Larson, Ann
Hardcover
Handbook for the Revolution: Building a More Perfect Union for the Twenty-First Century
Palmer, Derrick
Hardcover
Trade Up: Why the Future Belongs to Skilled Trades and How Career Education is Transforming the Workforce
Altmire, Jason
Burr, Riley
Paperback
Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do
Terkel, Studs
Paperback
The Double Tax: How Women of Color Are Overcharged and Underpaid
Clinton, Chelsea
Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, Anna
Hardcover
Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone
Jaffe, Sarah
Paperback
WorkKeys Study Guide and Practice Test Questions: ACT WorkKeys Exam Prep and Review Book with Applied Mathematics, Locating Information, and Reading f
Trivium Exam Prep Team
Paperback
The Real Domestic Product: How Birth Control Built Equality (and Why the Future of the Economy and the Planet Depends on It)
Gregory, Elizabeth
Hardcover
We Are the Union: How Worker-To-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big
Blanc, Eric
Paperback
Fast Food Nation 25th Anniversary Edition: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
Schlosser, Eric
Paperback
Influencer Creep: How Optimization, Authenticity, and Self-Branding Transform Creative Culture
Bishop, Sophie
Paperback
Get on the Job and Organize: Standing Up for a Better Workplace and a Better World
Brisack, Jaz
Paperback
Four Days a Week: The Life-Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving Well-Being, and Working Smarter
Schor, Juliet
Hardcover
Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century
Braverman, Harry
Paperback
The Trafficker Next Door: How Household Employers Exploit Domestic Workers
Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar
Hardcover
Class Warfare in Black Atlanta: Grassroots Struggles, Power, and Repression under Gentrification
Wood, Augustus
Paperback
Entrevista de Trabajo: Como usar la entrevista de trabajo a tu favor para conseguir empleo.
Estrada, Gonzalo
Paperback
The Licensing Racket: How We Decide Who Is Allowed to Work, and Why It Goes Wrong
Allensworth, Rebecca Haw
Hardcover
The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy, Tenth Anniversary Edition
Berg, Maggie
Seeber, Barbara K.
Hardcover
Get on the Job and Organize: Standing Up for a Better Workplace and a Better World
Brisack, Jaz
Hardcover
Scaling Up Compensation: 5 Design Principles for Turning Your Largest Expense Into a Strategic Advantage
Ross, Sebastian
Harnish, Verne
Paperback
Pay the People!: Why Fair Pay Is Good for Business and Great for America
The Patriotic Millionaires
Driscoll, John
Pearl, Morris
Paperback
The ROI of Human Capital: Measuring the Economic Value of Employee Performance
Fitz-Enz, Jac
Paperback
The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation
Frey, Carl Benedikt
Paperback
Freedom Train: Black Politics and the Story of Interracial Labor Solidarity
de Leon, Cedric
Paperback
Understanding Executive Compensation and Governance: A Practical Guide
Groeninger, Kurt
Becker, Irving S.
Hardcover
Unite and Win: The Workplace Organizer's Handbook
(Ewoc), Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee
Paperback
Help Wanted: How to Find and Keep Talent in a Forever-Tight Labor Market
Rubin, Jerry
Dawson, Steven L.
Hardcover
The Adaptation Advantage: Let Go, Learn Fast, and Thrive in the Future of Work
McGowan, Heather E.
Shipley, Chris
Paperback
Organizing Amazon: Building Worker Power Under Conditions of Fragmentation, Precarity and Regimentation
Vickers, Tom
Paperback
Tax the Rich!: How Lies, Loopholes, and Lobbyists Make the Rich Even Richer
Patriotic Millionaires, The
Pearl, Morris
Payne, Erica
Paperback
Leading Unionized Workforces in the Age of AI: Managing Skilled and Unskilled Labor in a Changing World
Gilewski, Nick E.
Paperback
Influencer Creep: How Optimization, Authenticity, and Self-Branding Transform Creative Culture
Bishop, Sophie
Hardcover
The Good Jobs Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs and Boost Profits
Ton, Zeynep
Hardcover
The Case for Good Jobs: How Great Companies Bring Dignity, Pay, and Meaning to Everyone's Work
Ton, Zeynep
Hardcover
The Master-Servant Doctrine: How Old Legal Rules Haunt the Modern Workplace
Tippett, Elizabeth Chika
Paperback
Making the Cut: Hiring Decisions, Bias, and the Consequences of Nonstandard, Mismatched, and Precarious Employment
Pedulla, David
Paperback
All Work Is Cultural Work: Diasporic Haitian Women, Paid Labor, and Cultural Citizenship
Carney, Nikita
Paperback
The Political Theologies of Populism: The Garveyites, the Klan, and the Wobblies, 1905-1930
Bossen, Colin
Paperback
The Human Interface: How Workers Can Step Into the Tech Conversation--And Lead It
Negrón, Wilneida
Hardcover
The Creation of Value by Living Labour: A Normative and Empirical Study - Vol. 1
Cheng, Enfu
Paperback
Respectability on the Line: Gender, Race, and Labor Along British and Colonial Indian Railways Volume 24
Armstrong-Price, Mattie
Paperback
The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad for So Many and What Can Be Done to Improve It
Weil, David
Paperback
Reassembling the UAW: Insurgency, Contention, and the Struggle for Unionism in the American South
Walker, Abe
Paperback
The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival
Pradhan, Manoj
Goodhart, Charles
Hardcover
Wild Wild East: Exiled Americans, Enslaved Indians and the Systemic Abuse of the H-1B Visa Programme
Thakur, Tanul
Hardcover
Building a Better World, 4th Edition: An Introduction to the Labour Movement in Canada
Ross, Stephanie
Savage, Larry
Paperback
We Are the Union: How Worker-To-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big
Blanc, Eric
Hardcover
Strike Back: Rediscovering Militant Tactics to Fight the Attacks on Public Employee Unions
Burns, Joe
Paperback
Getting Me Cheap: How Low-Wage Work Traps Women and Girls in Poverty
Freeman, Amanda
Dodson, Lisa
Hardcover
Undelivered: From the Great Postal Strike of 1970 to the Manufactured Crisis of the U.S. Postal Service
Rubio, Philip F.
Paperback
Legalized Inequalities: Immigration and Race in the Low-Wage Workplace
Griffith, Kati L.
Gleeson, Shannon
Campos-Medina, Patricia
Paperback
The Mine Next Door: Turning Points in Corporate Social Responsibility Communicative Practice
O'Connor, Amy
Paperback
Freedom Train: Black Politics and the Story of Interracial Labor Solidarity
de Leon, Cedric
Hardcover
Handbook of U.S. Labor Statistics 2026: Employment, Earnings, Prices, Productivity, and Other Labor Data
Ryan, Mary Meghan
Hardcover
The Creation of Value by Living Labour: A Normative and Empirical Study - Vol. 2
Cheng, Enfu
Paperback
Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Slavery
Engerman, Stanley L.
Fogel, Robert William
Paperback
Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers
Conniff, Ruth
Hardcover
Working in the 21st Century: An Oral History of American Work in a Time of Social and Economic Transformation
Larson, Mark
Hardcover
Take Back the Power: The Fall and Rise and Fall of Nyc's Transport Workers Union Local 100, 1975-2009
Kagan, Marc
Hardcover
The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform Movement
Kraus, Neil
Paperback
The HR Business Partner Handbook: A Practical Guide to Being Your Organization's Strategic People Expert
Templeman, Glenn
Paperback
Why We Must Work: Economic Freedom, Fulfilling Work, and Workplace Democracy
Wisman, Jon D.
Paperback
Remembering Ludlow but Forgetting the Columbine: The 1927-1928 Colorado Coal Strike
Campbell-Hale, Leigh
Paperback
Proving Safety: wicked problems, legal risk management and the tyranny of metrics
Smith, Greg
Paperback
Fantasies of Hong Kong Disneyland: Attempted Indigenizations of Space, Labor, and Consumption
Banh, Jenny
Paperback
Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won't Do
Thompson, Gabriel
Paperback
Debt and the Future of Workers: Financialization as Exploitation in the 21st Century
Gouzoulis, Giorgos
Hardcover
Side Hustle Safety Net: How Vulnerable Workers Survive Precarious Times
Ravenelle, Alexandrea J.
Paperback
Theatre Work: Reimagining the Labor of Theatrical Production
Clements Cotton, Brídín
Robin, Natalie
Paperback
Reassembling the UAW: Insurgency, Contention, and the Struggle for Unionism in the American South
Walker, Abe
Hardcover