More than one in every hundred British employees now works in a telephone call-centre, according to the most comprehensive research done of the new industry.

The Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics has studied the way people work in offices where enquiries are taken for anything from telephone banking to marketing.

Sue Fernie: 'tyranny' of call centres

The LSE research shows there are now more people working in call-centres than in the coal, steel and car industry put together.

Two-hundred-thousand employees answer public queries in 7,000 centres, often located in remote areas.

The LSE research shows a level of monitoring and control unheard of in old-style, manufacturing factories.

In some centres, employees are "force fed" calls, with no choice but to answer the next one.

There are often rigid targets timed to the second for dealing with calls.

Sue Fernie who wrote the report says the conditions in call centres are frequently intolerable: "People use to work in factories on assembly lines. People used to talk about the tyranny of the assembly line. But it is a Sunday school picnic compared to what we find in a call-centre.

"The agent's activities are monitored from the minute they come in to the minute they leave. There is not a single minute in the day when the supervisor does not know what the agent is doing or not doing".

Critics say call-centres are nothing short of "white-collar factories" but their defenders deny that oppressive monitoring leads to low morale and bad customer relations.

Call-centre agent, Morgan Paulle: some people do find it too much

The LSE researchers say they were surprised to find little evidence of discontent, though they did find people leaving after eighteen months, as they put it, "burnt out".

Morgan Paulle takes calls from people with parking fines. He says his employer's good but the public difficult: "There have been a couple of incidents where people have thrown off their headsets and said ' I'm not here to take this sort of thing' and stormed off. If one person does it, there is often a knock-on effect with another person doing it."

Call-centres bring new jobs

Despite the apparent problems, call-centres are bringing jobs to areas of high unemployment.

Matrixx Marketing has helped to rejuvenate Newcastle where it takes calls from Europe and America in English, French, Italian, Flemish, German.

Managers like Paul Williams say monitoring helps staff: "Sure there is quality control, but it is different from the old days of oppressive factory control. We use quality assessment in a very progressive way, which helps people understand their own career paths and personal development."

Call-centres are now the British growth industry, way ahead of the rest of Europe.

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