Dial 118 for Murder (2003)

From the June 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

BT’s 192 directory enquiries service is closing in August, and we are told to be grateful for new competing services. Instead of an easy-to-remember 3-figure number, there’ll now be dozens of companies offering over 300 different 6-figure numbers beginning with 118.

Have people really got the time or inclination to work out who’s best by comparing all the different charges for land lines and mobiles, standing charges, minimum charges and costs per minute? And what’s the point, they’ll only keep changing in the rivalrous pursuit of profit, just as credit card companies keep trying to take more market share with constantly altering offers.

118??? callers will, doubtless, have even more of their precious time within capitalism used up by time-wasting tactics, resulting in bigger dividends for shareholders from higher per-minute charges for users. Yet more time will be wasted as newspapers fight for our attention with adverts, and TV and radio broadcasts fill our heads with ‘catchy’ images and inane jingles. “One-one-eight — four-three-two — buy from us brain-washing you”, probably won’t be heard.

Capitalism tells us that competition offers us more choice and lower prices, but it’s lies. Sure, companies like BT, having switched call centre jobs from the UK to India, where wages are as little as £5 a day compared to around £5 an hour in Britain, will cut costs. But these savings will be used to increase profits. And after years of this wearisome ridiculousness involving constantly changing prices, 118 business competition will have knocked out the weaker firms leaving just one or two dominating, who will not then be under pressure to sell cheaply.

A competitive society does not benefit the exploited working class majority. Even if capitalism could maintain pressure on businesses to always sell at the lowest possible prices, capitalists would still be the winners, as market forces also apply to employment. With less money needed to buy goods and services, workers’ demands can be supplied by lower pay, and that’s precisely what a competitive work market brings about, leaving most people, as always, constantly struggling through life until they finally get to rest, in their coffins.

There is no so-called “freedom” to “shop around” for competing businesses offering directory inquiries, credit cards, gas, electricity, telephones, insurance, loans, life insurance, car insurance, home insurance etc. All this activity is actually a debilitating cancer that eats away at those parts of your life not already consumed by profit-taking capitalists, or by time spent bill checking, bill paying, bank statement checking, tax form filling, benefit form completing, cash till queuing and all the other money-associated madness.

And while people maintain a junkie-like addiction to moolah, comparing RRP resin, using COD crack, sampling APR angel dust, getting high on HP horse and regularly dropping ATM acid into wallets and purses, they will be easy prey for the profit-taking, parliamentary and advertising pushers forever telling them they’ve got just what they need. And those totally hooked will fail to see or care that money peddlers control them, or how, and so will just go on feeding their habit by selling themselves and their acquiescence for a wage or state handout.

Stop making those attempts at complex monetary calculations which companies deliberately make complicated so customers can’t easily figure things out, and give up, submissively paying out to avoid stress and hassle. Dial 020 7622 3811 for details of real socialism.

Max Hess

Cooking the Books: Prophecies about productivity (2025)

The Cooking The Books column from the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Sky to cut 2,000 jobs at its call centres in pivot to AI’ (Times, 28 March) is a typical headline these days as generative AI (like ChatGPT) is applied to white-collar work.

In an experiment carried out by an American firm of management consultants in 2023, call centre workers using AI handled 13.8 percent more customer enquiries per hour than those without, business professionals wrote 59 percent more documents per hour, and programmers coded 126 percent more projects per week. Averaging these, they came up with a figure of a 66 percent increase in productivity from applying AI. This they described as a ‘big deal’ because this ‘equate to 47 years of natural productivity gains in the United States’. But they were not comparing like with like.

They took into account only the work-time saved at the last stage of production, ignoring the labour previously expended, which would include in the case of their experiment labour spent on developing, installing and maintaining the AI system. If this had been taken into account, the productivity increase would be much smaller.

That developing and installing AI involves considerable amounts of labour is illustrated by a Sky spokesperson saying that ‘it was making a multi-million pound investment in its Livingston site, near Edinburgh, as part of a transformation “to deliver quicker, simpler and more digital customer service”’.

As the November 1979 Socialist Standard explained:

In everyday language a motor car is said to be ‘produced’ by the workers who assemble it, and bread to be ‘produced’ by workers in the bakehouse; but the labour of these workers is only a part of all that required to produce cars and bread. As Marx put it: “We must add to the quantity of labour last employed the quantity of labour previously worked up in the raw material of the commodity, and the labour bestowed on the implements, tools, machinery and buildings with which such labour is assisted” (Value, Price and Profit, chapter VI).

Let us assume that the ‘previous’ hours of labour needed to produce a commodity are 80, and the ‘last’ hours are 20 — a total of 100 hours. Let us further assume that without additional investment, but merely by simplifying the last operation, it becomes possible to reduce the necessary hours from 20 to 10. It then takes only 90 hours in all, in place of 100. Productivity will have risen by about 11 per cent. But if ‘productivity’ is calculated — wrongly — on the last operation only, it will appear to have increased by 100 per cent. Would anyone be so foolish as to look at it in that way? Well, yes — it is happening every day.

A news item about the introduction of a new machine operated by two men instead of the former ten will be presented as ‘two men do the work of ten’, as if the making and maintenance of the machine did not absorb additional labour. So productivity in that example will be said, wrongly, to have been multiplied by five. (…) As Marx explained, the amount of labour that is saved is not the whole saving on the last operating process, but the difference between that amount and the additional labour required for the new equipment (Capital, Vol.I. Kerr Edition, pp. 426-7). This is the true measure of increased productivity.

The mistaken theories have been responsible for a continuous enormous exaggeration of the increase of workers’ output, and corresponding false assumptions about the growth of unemployment. (…)

The consequence has been that every advance in technology — the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, computers and automation — and now the silicon chip — has given rise to prophecies that enormous numbers of workers would soon be out of work permanently.

Calling Home (2006)

From the August 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

One aspect of globalisation is out-sourcing or offshoring: moving jobs from a country where they've traditionally been performed to another, usually on the grounds of lower wages and therefore higher profits. This has already happened with many manufacturing jobs: work is now carried out in China and India rather than in Britain or elsewhere in Western Europe.

But factories aren't the only workplaces to be outsourced, for it also applies to one of the 'boom' occupations of recent years, namely workers in the call centres which are often now the only way to contact your bank, insurers or credit card company. A huge office-cum-warehouse where employees essentially just answer the phone all day doesn't need to be in the same country as the caller or the company's head office. After all, if you live in Dover it probably doesn't matter if your call is answered by someone in Delhi rather than Darlington — indeed you may well not know where the person at the other end of the phone line is. Hence many call centres operate in India, which has a ready and keen supply of educated English-speakers. Workers there are given special classes in British TV, especially soap operas, so they can engage in chit-chat with callers, who often want to do a bit more than just talk about their bank account. Savings for the employers could be as much as 50 percent over a similar operation in Britain.

But now it seems that all is not so rosy in the garden of the outsourced call centre (Guardian, 30 June). For one thing, workers in India have turned out to be not so docile or grateful for the work after all, as absenteeism and staff turnover approach levels found in the UK. This is what happens with so many of the jobs resulting from globalisation: they're boring, there's no career structure, and workers are subject to a lot of petty controls such as the time taken for breaks. And for another, there have been complaints about poor service, and some companies make a point of advertising the fact that their own call centres are still in Britain. There's no doubt some prejudice operating here, against non-native speakers of English, but if companies lose customers because of their perceptions about call centres then they will sit up and take notice.

The sting in the tail of the Guardian article is the information that an Indian out-sourcing company is intending to set up a large new call centre in Belfast, attracted by the cheap property prices there. Capitalism truly is a global system, and those who own the means of production will go to any lengths to boost their profits.

Paul Bennett

Voice From The Back: Thought for food (1998)

The Voice From The Back Column from the February 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Thought for food

Back in the summer, the weather expert in the Guardian chatted about global warming and came to the conclusion that it was capitalism that would cause the problems, not carbon dioxide. She or he said: “[A] Deep Truth about world food supply . . . has been clear since the Science Policy Research Unit made an in depth analysis of climate and world food in the 1970s. There is no difficulty in growing enough food to feed even the increased population of the globe in the 21st century, however the climate changes. The reason why there are famines now, and will be in the future, is that food is not distributed evenly. On many scenarios, the overall effect of global warming will be to increase world food supply. But the haves are likely to have even more, while the have nots experience the droughts and famines. People starve because of politics, not because of the weather.”

It’s a business

As the law stands, dealers in illegal drugs can register their trade for tax purposes and tax officials will protect their identify from the police and other government agencies . . . A spokesman for the Inland Revenue said: “Tax law does not discriminate between profits made from illegal or legal activities. We only report taxpayers to the police if we suspect they are involved in murder” (Independent on Sunday, 16 November)

It’s a crime!

Magistrates in Wales have fined a woman £200 for possessing a tiny piece of cannabis with an estimated street value of 50p. The 23-year-old single mother pleaded guilty to have 0.2 grammes of cannabis at her home in Cernarth, Dyfed, and on top of the fine was order to pay £40 costs. Her solicitor, Mr Alan Lewis, said. “The drug seized was no more than the size of a grain of rice, barely enough to smoke. It was so small she could have brushed it off the table and no one would have known” (Independent on Sunday, 16 November).

New sweatshops

Automatic all distribution (ACD) and information and communication technology (ICT) have enabled call centres to become hugely powerful business machines, and the UK has proudly assumed the mantle of Europe’s “call centre capital”. With more than 250,000 people already employed in call centres, and around 1 million expected to join them by the end of the decade, it is the fastest growing employment sector of the economy . . . Call centres are all about cost reduction. If companies learned one lesson from the recession it was from Direct Line founder Peter Wood’s brainwave: slashing wage bills by replacing hundreds of high street outlets with a shed full of telephones . . . In several of the largest call centres, operators are virtually chained to their desks, even having to ask permission for toilet breaks . . . John Orsmond, chairman of Advertising Research Marketing, which advises advertisers on how to use call centres, says he knows of employers in Scotland paying rates as low as £2.35 an hour.

A grateful nation

An 81-year-old crippled war veteran who was refused a place in a care home by his local authority, threw himself under a train after his pleas for help were ignored, a Northern Ireland inquest heard yesterday . . . Mr McLarnon has been taunted by youths for being an ex-soldier, the court heard. On the day he died, he had visited his local British Legion club—as he usually did—and asked friends for help. He had only 63p in his bank book and did not have enough for his bus fare home. Elizabeth Thompson, nursing manager of the Somme home for ex-soldiers in Belfast, said she had recommended Mr McLarnon’s admittance but the health board has refused to fund it. Health chiefs had been “irate” about the pressure being put on them (Guardian, 13 November).

Giving thanks

As the service of thanksgiving for the life of billionaire Sir James Goldsmith entered its second hour at St John’s in London’s Smith Square on Thursday, the first of the 700-plus congregation began to leave. Baroness Thatcher, who was due at another memorial service, for Viscount Tonypandy, was followed by GEC boss Lord Weinstock and the Earl of Suffolk. In the event the celebration lasted more than two hours, something of a shock for Goldsmith’s widow lady Annabel . . . (Mail on Sunday, 16 November).