Fast-Paced Dullness : Operators: Dial M for Monotony
Telephone operator Barbara Cordova was connecting a collect call one day when she suddenly froze at her computer terminal. On the line was a Pacific Bell “quality sampler” checking operator performance and Cordova’s lapse earned her a negative review.
“It’s one of those things that happens when you get stressed out,” the soft-spoken phone operator lamented.
Fast work and heavy supervision have been the lot of telephone operators since the first switchboard was brought on line in 1878. Now, new technologies have steadily narrowed the range of tasks a phone operator performs, eliminating much of the customer contact and the occasional drama that once set phone operating apart from other routine service jobs.
More Than 600 Calls a Day
Under the watchful eye of supervisors, phone operators talk with 600 to 700 callers a day, handling each as quickly and politely as possible. Two 15-minute breaks a day and 30-second-per-customer speed requirements govern the operator’s working life.
“We take our Tylenol before we come in to work,” operator Letty Torrez sighed.
Torrez and Cordova are among 157,000 local telephone workers who have been on strike throughout the country since Sunday. At the bargaining table, their phone union--the Communications Workers of America--is fighting for improved health benefits and better wages. But on the picket lines, operators talk just as much of overbearing monitoring by management, rigid attendance rules and job stress.
Pacific Bell officials acknowledge that an operator’s job is difficult but say automation is necessary to meet the expanding needs of their customers. In fact, Bell spokeswoman Lissa Zanville says, automation has improved working conditions for operators as well. Operators, for instance, are no longer required to repeat the same information time and time again, and they always know when they are being monitored. Moreover, Zanville says, the monitoring is designed to protect operators from unreasonable customers as well as to ensure good service.
Demanding Public
Some of the tension the operators feel comes from dealing with a demanding public. Nearly every operator has stories to tell of rude callers screaming obscenities and crazed or lonely ones seeking comfort. But stress also results from the fast-paced monotony of the modern operator’s job.
Mostly, local “0” operators (who, since the 1984 breakup of the Bell System, do not handle long-distance calls) sit at computer terminals and place collect and credit-card calls. They dial numbers that are giving a customer trouble and inform them of the problem as it appears on the computer. Most calls are disposed of with a few words and keystrokes. Operators rarely are called on for the general-purpose problem-solving that once was part of the job.
Automation, of course, was inevitable, given how the phone business has grown. Jim Selzer, vice president for operator services at AT&T;, says a Bell Laboratories study in the early 1960s indicated that every woman in the United States eventually would have been needed as operators had mechanization not taken place. (Operators, for a variety of economic and social reasons, have been predominantly female since the early days of the telephone.)
The transition to the first generation of automated operator stations, which replaced the plugs and cables of the manual “cord board” with a computerized system in the early 1970s, improved efficiency by 50%, Selzer said. Additional changes came about with the subsequent introduction of direct credit-card dialing and direct international dialing.
“The traditional role of the operator has really changed,” Selzer said. “Before, people were acting as surrogates for technology. Today, they are getting people to feel comfortable and then handing them off to technology.”
Sense of Usefulness
But as that handoff is done more and more quickly, the operators say they have lost the sense that they are providing a useful service. “You will never convince me that you can satisfy customers in 30 seconds,” complained Debi Graffam, a Pacific Bell operator and union representative.
One woman who has been a phone operator since 1943 remembers when there was time “to be really friendly with people back then and they respected you. . . . “Today it’s so repetitious, just collect calls coming in steady--there’s no meat in the job.”
The “meat” once consisted, in part, of manually setting up long-distance calls by relay from one office to the next. An operator in North Hollywood connecting a customer to Peoria, Ill., for instance, would ring Los Angeles central, Los Angeles would ring Chicago, and Chicago would ring Peoria to complete the circuit. The process required skill and, in the doing, yielded a certain satisfaction.
The jobs were not without drama. At one time, operators were responsible for clearing circuits and setting up priority calls. During World War II, for instance, handling priority calls related to the war effort gave them a sense of excitement that is missing today, veteran operators recall.
The jobs also required a certain knowledge. Operators responded to so many information queries that the appellation “information” was replaced with “directory assistance” in the 1960s. Today, the “411” directory assistance operators simply type the requested name in their computer and a synthetic voice provides the number.
The shift toward automation was gradual. The manual functions of an operator began to decline as early as 1889 when a Kansas City undertaker named Almon Strowger, suspicious that local operators were steering calls to a rival funeral parlor, invented the automatic telephone exchange. By the 1920s, many local telephone calls were connected automatically. By the early 1960s, most long-distance calls were automated and by the 1970s, new technology reduced the role of operators in collect, person-to-person and other specialized services.
A General Telephone office in Thousand Oaks is one of the few places where a taste of the old days can still be had. There, the old-fashioned cord board still is used. Five operators sit on high stools at one end of the 50-foot-long, 10-foot-high black monolith, which is covered with round plug sockets, tiny lights and color-code strips.
As they talk, operators plug and unplug the cords from the base of the board, put paper tickets into a mechanical time clock and fill in the phone numbers with pencil. Occasionally, they consult their 400-page card file for details on how to route certain calls.
The cord board is now used for marine, air-to-ground and mobile communications, explained Peggy Nowicki, coordinator for customer contact support, because those calls lack certain signaling characteristics required by modern operator equipment. A state-of-the-art facility across the hall is used for more conventional calls. There, operators sit in front of shiny computer terminals that are arranged in ergonomically designed, six-sided pods.
As calls come in, an array of information, including the originating number and the type of phone being used, automatically appears on the screen. Most calls can be handled in seconds. A computer data base contains the information that once was contained in the card files.
Although some of the GTE operators are trained to work on both types of equipment, there isn’t much contest as to which they prefer. “People on our side hate to go to their side,” chuckled Linda Reynen, who works mostly on the cord board. Unlike their Pacific Bell counterparts, the GTE workers agreed on a contract recently without striking.
At the AT&T; operator center in Burbank, the modern equipment is the same but the tasks--which involve long-distance rather than local calls--are more varied. Much of the traffic is international, frequently involving Spanish-speaking callers and dealing with foreign operators. The supervisors aim for an AWT (average work time) of 42 to 46 seconds per call, rather than the 30 seconds for local calls at Pacific Bell and GTE.
AT&T;, which faces competition from MCI, US Sprint and a host of other long-distance phone companies, has seen the value of having operators work with customers. “Operator services is recognized as a very good link to the consumer, a way to find out their needs and wants,” explained Linda Davis, group manager for operator services at the Burbank office.
AT&T; operator Jan Burris, contacted on a random call, did not mind taking some time to chat. “With the competition, this company is a lot better than it used to be,” she said. AT&T; operators signed a new collective bargaining agreement in May.
But even for long-distance operators, relations with customers just aren’t what they once were.
Vida Smith, an AT&T; operator for 34 years, doesn’t miss the cord boards--too much work stretching to plug and unplug calls--but she does miss the personal contact. “When I started in Hollywood, you had to go through the operator to call the Valley,” she recalled. “We got to talk to all the people, the movie stars. I liked the studios. They would send us candy at Christmas.”
Beverly Riewer, a 28-year AT&T; operator, recalls the time she helped Cary Grant call his daughter in Paris. “That part was so exciting,” she said. “Now it’s all automatic.”
As computers have reduced the scope of an operator’s job, they also have left workers vulnerable to ailments associated with heavy use of video display terminals (VDTs) and to the prospect of increased stress-related problems.
David LeGrande, a CWA health specialist in Washington, said computers can produce vision problems and “potentially catastrophic muscular-skeletal” injuries. The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, he said, is investigating repetitive motion injuries, which can produce debilitating pain and paralysis, at some directory assistance centers in Denver and Phoenix.
LeGrande said one national survey had found “greater numbers of health problems among operators than other occupations. These jobs are very stringently controlled. We’ve had reports of miscarriages among directory assistance operators because they couldn’t take frequent bathroom breaks.” Pacific Bell, citing the ongoing strike, declined to comment on the issue of health problems and a GTE spokeswoman said no statistics were available.
Heavy monitoring of performance has been a phone company tradition. Supervisors once roller-skated up and down the front of the board to keep an eye on workers. And standards, from how to respond to customers to how long to spend with them, were around in the last century. But these days, any worker, phone operators among them, who can be electronically monitored and whose computer operations can be recorded suffers “a great deal more stress than other occupations,” says Barbara Garson, author of “The Electronic Sweatshop.”
Such supervision, the repetitive nature of the jobs and the fact that “the people aspect, providing a service, has been automated out of the job,” have made the stress problems among operators more acute, LeGrande said.
Operators today earn from about $240 to $490 a week.
In terms of service occupations, their jobs “are regarded as well-paying, but they are jobs which very few operators really like anymore,” LeGrande said.
