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.

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Preface and Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

Before the Breakup

Becoming a Workforce of Resistance

Organizing to Block the Low Road Path

False Promises? Job Redesign through Union-Management Partnerships

Fighting for Job Security

Striking for Stress Relief

Epilogue

Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

Index

|"Disconnected is one of the most insightful accounts of corporate power, work, and unionism that I have read in years. Goldman's research is meticulous, her judgments astute, and her prose crystal clear. She tells a story not of triumph but of resourcefulness and grit in an era of relentless corporate deregulation and technological change."—Gary Gerstle, author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era
|Debbie J. Goldman is the former Research Director and Telecommunications Policy Director with the Communications Workers of America.