Call Centres

Call centre action month 2009: thousands of workers stand up for their rights globally

By UNI Global Union

Thousands of workers from 20 unions in 20 countries on 6 continents made Call Centre Action Month a great success.

Excerpted from the UNI Bulletin, November 2009

Call Centre Action Month exemplifies what workers and their unions can do when they come together to campaign at the global level and to advance their work at home.

Thousands of Tell Telefonica postcards have been signed in Brazil, Mexico, Ireland, the USA, Swaziland, Uganda, South Africa, Australia, France, Switzerland and around the globe.

Many more people have signed UNI's online petition to call on Telefonica to respect its workers rights and its Global Agreement with UNI.

UNI also released its research report A World on the Phone in October in English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese and Dutch. The report charts the day-to-day experiences of call centre workers in Latin America, the United States, Australia, Europe and Africa.

At the national level, unions in the Philippines are running an education project regarding call centre workers' rights. In Australia, the Australian Services Union (ASU) is continuing its bargaining and organising campaigns, winning a new agreement just last week.

In the USA, CWA held its annual Customer Service Professional Appreciation Day on 21 October. The union visited call centres around the country throughout the whole month to celebrate the work of customer service

workers and also to promote global union campaigning, by distributing a staggering 15,000 Tell Telefonica post cards for workers to sign.

In Canada, the CEP's executive board issued a statement of support for Telefonica workers and wrote to the company, while also applying for recognition as the union for call centre workers at Bell in Ontario.

In Belgium, call centre unions continued their national "Needs more hands?" campaign.

UNI looks forward to building on these successes and growing more and stronger call centre unions in 2010.