Show caption ‘Workers had to regulate their behaviour knowing at any moment they could lose their job.’ Photograph: Reza Estakhrian/Getty Images Future of work As a call centre worker I saw how employees are stripped of their rights Jamie Woodcock Call centres are ‘electronic panopticons’ where staff are constantly watched and stress is used as a management strategy Looking for a job in customer services? Browse Guardian Jobs and find the perfect role to suit you Thu 16 Feb 2017 02.00 EST Share on Facebook

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In the late 18th century, British philosopher Jeremy Bentham devised a prison, called the panopticon, which would allow a supervisor to watch all of the cells from a single point. The idea was that the inmates, not knowing if they were being watched, would regulate their own behaviour.

The modern call centre has been described as an “electronic panopticon” (pdf) – a place designed in a way that strips workers of their rights. Having spent six months working in one while researching my book, I can confirm this is the case.

In the call centre workers were constantly watched. Every action was logged, from the number of sales made, to the time spent on calls and the length of breaks taken – measured precisely to the second. Because calls were recorded, errors – which were often hard to avoid under such pressurised conditions – were used to discipline and fire workers on the spot.

Adding to the weight of surveillance were gruelling targets. These targets were displayed on whiteboards at the end of each row of desks. A large TV hung from the ceiling showing a running total of how many sales each worker made, ranked in order.

This environment was psychologically draining for many of the workers and created a very tangible feeling of precariousness. This precariousness was used as a managerial strategy to discipline and motivate workers, creating an oppressive, stressful, and exploitative workplace. The workers had to regulate their own behaviour, knowing that at any moment they could lose their job.

The most effective motivator the managers had at their disposal was letting workers leave early if they met their targets. Rather than paying bonuses – or offering a decent flexible working policy to fit in with the employees’ lives – the option to knock off a bit earlier was dangled as a carrot, and entirely on the employer’s terms. This incentive to escape the workplace perhaps helps explain why there are astonishingly high turnover rates at call centres in the UK.

The spread of precariousness has transformed contemporary work. People do not want to stay in these sort of jobs for the long term, yet at the same time they fear losing them. This fear puts greater power in the hands of bullying and abusive managers, able to engage in spectacle-like punishment, armed with reams of data from the electronic panopticons that watch over us.

With many of the processes in call centres becoming automated, workers face yet another threat to their future job security. But a solution to this precariousness does not have to be limited to stricter employment contracts. When talking about improving working conditions, too often we focus on the issue of pay – important as it is – rather than control. There needs to be opposition to the use of these surveillance methods. Achieving this requires new forms of workplace organisation, experimenting with and updating the best traditions of trade unions.

Work remains the main activity that most of us will spend the majority of our time doing, and so we urgently need to find alternatives to how it is currently organised. The first glimpses of these alternatives come from listening to the voices of precarious workers: hearing the experiences of those at the sharp end of the transformation of work, like those in call centres, and seeing what happens when they start to organise together.

Jamie Woodcock is author of Working the Phones: control and resistance in call centres