While doing a street stall for the $15 campaign, Nigel Brookes, an ex-employee of an un-unionised call centre in Mt Albert approached the team to discuss his experiences. Unite represents hundreds of market research workers across 7 of the biggest companies. This year we signed collective agreements at six of these companies where members get regular pay rises, secure hours and representation to management.

The following story should remind our members of what happens when a call centre is not unionised and the employer has more power than the workers. Some of the things that happened to Nigel are illegal and prove that bosses will callously break the law to protect their profits…

Recently I was let go from Reid Research Services, a market research call centre in the Auckland suburb of Mt Albert. As they usually suspended people for a week if they had no work or so I just assumed this was the case, as it was fairly standard practice. After not hearing from them for a fortnight I started looking for a new job, as I was planning to leave the following week anyway.

A fortnight or so later (still not entirely sure whether or not I was still employed), I was walking down Queen Street and ran into Joe, a member of your organisation. He explained a bit about what you were about and I eagerly signed your petition. After explaining to him my own situation he urged me to get in touch via email so that others would know about Reid Research being a pretty dodgy place.

I don't know if everyone felt as I did working there and it sounds like things were a bit better last year, but having only worked there 8 months I couldn’t really comment. However the things that happened to me were pretty crazy.

Firstly, when I started working there at the end of January 2009, the minimum wage was not yet $12.50 and the starting rate was $12.60 an hour. When we started we were assured that we could rise to a staggering $18 within 3 months if we worked hard enough although the only person I met there that was earning so much had been working there 6 years!

This sounded great but it did worry me a little bit when we had to sign an employment contract without reading it in order to get the job. An added incentive was that we received $1 per hour more if we were working on a field job (working directly with respondents rather than over the phone). The first time I got to work "out on the field" was fantastic, although I was working nearly 13 hour days, I was getting paid quite well and with only skeleton staff, it was pretty casual.

After doing this once or twice more, I noticed my pay for field and in-office work had slipped below its original rate, matching the new minimum wage rate of $12.50 per/hr.

Never hearing of an employer lowering pay rates, I enquired at the front desk as to the reason for the change. I had been told by my supervisor that reception staff were in charge of employee wages. I can't tell you exactly what the woman behind the desk told me, but suffice to say it was aggressive, defensive and completely dodging the issue of my wages altogether. I spoke to some other employees about it and they had not noticed their pay drop until that point, but were equally pissed off about it.

We would also routinely have our weeks wages suspended, not receiving them until the following week, for any small or insignificant mistake on the surveys. I myself experienced this many times, even having my pay suspended without knowing what the problem was. This was compounded by the fact that no one seemed to know how to fill the surveys in correctly so everyone you asked would tell you something different.

But the main thing that aggravated me about Reid Research was the fact that there was no way to voice grievances as we only had limited contact with management and were given a pretty clear message of "You are expendable. If you have a problem with your treatment here, just accept it and keep your head down because you will be replaced otherwise".

Breaks in the call centre were only 10 minutes long for every 4 hours, while at other market research companies breaks are 15 minutes for every four hours. One time I saw to Somali women come back two minutes late for their shift from a break, because the clock in the lunchroom was slow. The Supervisor told them to sign a timesheet saying they had taken a half-hour break and to deduct that half-hour from their pay. When the women began speaking in Somali to each other about what was happening, they were immediately told by the Supervisor that only English could be spoken in the call centre. When this happened they decided to walk out and never came back again.

The most alarming thing I saw in the call centre was what happened when the computer program we used ran out of phone numbers to dial. When this happened we were told to ring anyone we knew, friends and family mostly, to get the rest of surveys we needed. For example I ended up calling my own brother to get surveys for a TV3 political poll.

With a company growing in scope (they conduct all the political polls for TV3 News) and receive outsourced work from Colmar Brunton, their treatment of staff is well below what one would expect, and I want people to know that they do not have any respect for their employees.

I hope that the details of my experiences can help in some way to improve Reid Research and to encourage Unite to keep fighting the good fight.

Nigel Brookes.

Unite will be running an organising drive in Reid Research over the next week.