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I had a job working in IT telephone tech support for a couple of months last year for a local Canberra non-profit charitable organisation, Tadaust. The organisation raised funds through an ISP department to support the process of constructing technical aid (wheelchairs, devices, etc.) for the disabled. The target demographic for the ISP was the elderly, the disabled and military veterans. Shouting instructions down the phone to a hearing-impaired 85 year old about how to reset and configure their broadband modem could be a trying experience and certainly taught me a lot about patience. The job was a good job in the sense that it helped to develop assets for an organisation which helped the disabled and the technical support we were giving out was to people who really did need the help more than your average IT customer. There were however (and in my opinion) some serious problems with this kind of confluence of charity and business.
The ISP arm of this organisation was run with a time-sensitive focus - that is, we were to get through as many calls and callbacks as quickly as possible. This led to a serious ethical conundrum. The customers were generally elderly and disabled people - people who required time, compassion and patience but we were expected to treat it as any other IT business. I tended to get in a lot of trouble from my supervisor for talking too much to the customers because I felt it was naturally the right thing to do. To be fair though - because it was a charity organisation it could not afford at the time to employ more than 6 technical support staff for a client base of almost 30,000 people. Although this was actually my first casual employment I was old enough to not be too surprised by the ironies I encountered in the domain of this kind of charity-business.
I recently discovered quite a serious ethical problem which is largely unrelated to the organisation I was working in but concerns the nature of such casual employment. Specifically - that such casual work which does not feature paid holidays is in fact in contravention of Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). How many people working in casual employment and devoid of paid holidays are aware of this violation of their human rights ?
RSS 
As far as ethical practices by private companies are concerned, forget paid holidays. Even enough paid casual leaves are sometimes not given to permanent workers. Forget the casual employees. The capitalist world is a dog eat dog world. Human rights and things like that look only good on paper. They have academic value only. :-)
one hopes for the academic stuff someday trickling down
International IT scenario looks bleak? Can you please elaborate on that sir? I thought all the voice and tech support jobs are going to your country. Surely the companies are making a killing both sides - one by saving money by getting first world job done by third world countries where they pay third world wages to their employees, and the third world companies are making a killing by getting all the first world service industry jobs.
Graeme can rest assured that sooner or later the elderlies that he showed concern about would be serviced well by the third world countries. Of course, it is a different issue altogether whether the companies in the third world adhere to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights charter.
BTW thanks for the piece of info on the Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Maybe I can take a point to my employer :)
After all it is a kind of welfare service for the citizens, isn't it?
seems u r quite pissed off at ur former employers, ain't ya? first u highlight the insensitivity of ur co towards the frail needing help by rushing things up and then u cleverly bring out the human rights article that calls for the signatories of the UDHR to make sure even casual workers get paid holidays.
i must admit that i m in complete agreement with u esp when u mentioned in ur comment that the telecom industry is the worst when it comes to dehumanizing services.
@ Leon - the Outsourcing of call center services is actually quite a contentious issue here in Australia. While we all understand why companies work their service centers from various places like
Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad, etc. - the matter of how well these call center staff are actually paid, in relative terms, is a significant one.
@ Alex - I am not really pissed off with the company - I just see that there is this vast and gaping ethical hole in the heart of it. The company assists the elderly and the disabled - which is marvellous. The main way they raise money (other than the usual charitable donations etc.) is through their ISP department. It just seemed to be such an enormous discontinuity between what they stood for and the way they treated some of their customers. That said, some of the customers were very happy with the service. The worst days were when you got numerous calls from people who just didn’t understand the issues of modems or drivers and were close to tears because they couldn’t ”get on the internet”. Most of these old dears just wanted to email a few friends and get photos of their grandchildren emailed to them. I used to try and reassure people by telling them that computers are just glorified toasters... and in terms of being thermodynamic (i.e. energy) processing devices this analogy bears some comparison. ;)
