Chapter two: the call-centre cometh

And so we continue our tale a far-off (kind of) land, where a hopeless People's (some might say New Labour) Party Council is cutting services, getting rid of Council housing, spending millions of pounds on private consultants and paying senior management huge salaries for achieving bugger-all at great cost.

You can read the Prologue to this article here.
You can read Chapter One here .

Chapter Two: The Councillors try to sell reform and the idea of a call-centre to the staff

For the local branch secretary, it all began one Monday morning when she looked up from her newspaper in the staff cafe, and saw the Mayor standing in front of her. He had one hand in his pocket, and a big smile on his face.

The branch secretary sighed. She could barely stand it. For most of his career, the Mayor had been an old-style People's Party politician - a balding, often unshaven, large, committed working man who believed in community (even if he quietly preferred white ones), and was rarely seen in anything other than jeans, a Chelsea scarf, and an elderly vinyl jacket. Unfortunately, he had caught the modernisation bug, somehow, and had recently refashioned himself into a new-style People's Party politician, complete with banker's suit, manbag, earpiece, and a wispy little Hoxton fin on top of his head, where a mighty comb-over had once reigned.

The branch secretary stared at the Mayor. She felt about as depressed as she expected to. She'd known the Mayor for more than 20 years and had rarely seen him in anything other than the jacket and the driver's seat of his lorry. The view now was largely unreal: there were points of slight upgrade, but he mostly put the branch secretary in mind of a hosed-down Les Patterson. Leaving would be a bit pointed, though: she'd have to shove her table into the Mayor's knees to get out and get past him. She'd left her run too late, as well. He was stroking his fin and preparing to sit down.

'Hey, babe,' he grinned as he slithered into the chair next to the branch secretary. He ran his knobbly little hand down her back.

The branch secretary couldn't take it. She grabbed her bag and started to fold her paper. 'For Christ's sake, Tony,' she said, as she started to rise. 'Take a look at yourself and sort it out. You're starting to remind people of John Prescott.'

The Mayor was not concerned. He held the branch secretary's hand, and pressed her back into her chair. 'It's really lucky, me finding you here,' he grinned, winking at her. The branch secretary put her head in her hands. 'Everybody in the Cabinet was very keen for me to come and see you. They want us all to get together for a meeting - you, us, and all your members. We need to talk about the best way for the staff and your members to get the most out of making the Efficiency programme happen. This one is really important to us. We need the Efficiency programme to work if we're going to win this local election. We can't afford for your members not to like what we want to do here.'

The branch secretary looked at the Mayor. 'Well, you're right about that,' she said. 'I've got three thousand members at this branch, and most of them live and vote in this borough. I would say that if you want to win the next election, your best bet is to try not to piss them off by replacing them with bloody consultants.'

The Mayor kept grinning, although he started to chew his lip as he did it. 'Um, all right,' he said. 'You might have a point. We might have to think about the words we use.' He brightened. 'We'd definitely listen to any suggestions you wanted to make on that front,' he told the branch secretary. 'It's important that we get the message across properly. I've got a great idea - how about you and I sit down and write a statement for the staff about the Efficiency programme together?'

The branch secretary couldn't stand it anymore. She picked up her newspaper, lifted her handbag to the table, and began to feel around in inside it for her fags. 'I've got a great idea, too,' she said. 'How about you and the Cabinet call a staff meeting about all this and we'll just attend it? I'll bring the branch officers, but we'll leave the script up to you.' She got up, lit a cigarette, and left.

The Mayor stood up in a big hurry. 'Oh,' he said as the branch secretary disappeared. 'All right.'

True to his word, the Mayor arranged the meeting.

He was also the one who decided that the meeting should be held in the cavernous Assembly Hall in the Town Hall – an enormous, crumbling, echoing chamber that was usually used as emergency accommodation for the many residents in the many suburbs that were regularly evacuated when the borough's shoddy gas and/or water mains crapped out. Indeed, the Mayor found about ten of the most recent evacuees wandering around the Assembly Hall in their pyjamas on the morning of the meeting. He made the Chief Executive drive them home in the Mayoral people-carrier. 'Get them out!' the Mayor kept hissing. 'They want to get home, anyway. Just get them out!'

The Mayor was very, very nervous. He had decided that the huge Assembly Hall was the smart choice for the meeting, because he felt that the big space would help make staff interest look small. Almost every Council employee would have to attend the meeting if the Hall was to be filled.

Unfortunately for the Mayor, paranoia and concern at all levels of the organisation was such by this point that nobody – even the people who were planning it – wanted to miss a meeting about the Council's future. Frontline officers, administrators, social workers, teaching staff, benefits staff, policy staff, committee clerks, IT staff, agency staff and every single manager in the place – everybody started to file into the Hall a good 20 minutes before the meeting was due to start.

(The only person who wasn't in evidence was the Chief Executive, as it happened. He was not, alas, much of a presence generally. The Councillors, true to tremulous form, had appointed him three years ago on the strength of his extraordinary ability to excite passion in absolutely nobody. He'd been everything they'd hoped on this front - he'd signed his contract, met his PA, chose his furniture, and then never made another decision. Indeed, there were those who'd started to wonder if he was still alive. He hadn't been sighted by a staff member since senior management's most recent awayday. The Councillors seemed to understand that their sinking ship was also rudderless, but they glossed over it whenever anyone asked. They wouldn't discuss the CE at all).

But anyway - the huge Hall was filled to bursting. Hundreds of people were present. At 2pm, the meeting began.

The Deputy Mayor hit the ground running.

'You lot better bloody listen to me,' spat the Deputy Mayor by way of introduction. He slapped a tanned hand down on the table behind which he stood, and stabbed a finger at the wall-to-wall staff members, managers, union reps and union branch officers, many of whom had only just been able to find standing room down the back. 'You people need to start listening to me, or we're all bloody history. Got it? Have you got that? You need to bloody listen to me.'

Everyone sat up at this, including the Deputy Mayor's fellow Councillors.

'You don't say swear when you're talking to staff, for God's sake,' the Cabinet Member for Community Services said quite audibly to her advisor from her seat just two down from the Deputy Mayor's. 'What's he trying to do? God, that man is a fool. Does he seriously think that's the way to get people on board?'

The Mayor also looked concerned. The Deputy Mayor had talked the Mayor into letting him front this event. The Deputy Mayor reportedly ran some sort of PR business during the day, and the Mayor had decided that at the very least, having the Deputy Mayor on the job beat paying for PR finesse. Plus, the Deputy Mayor relied on the £30,000-odd a year he pulled for his various civic and Cabinet posts. He'd assured the Mayor that he had a real incentive to make sure that the staff bought his line.

Now, the Mayor wasn't so sure. He wondered why he kept buying into the Deputy Mayor's sales pitches. It occurred to him that the Deputy Mayor's ability and delivery record had been points of concern for some time. The Mayor found himself suddenly wondering if the Deputy Mayor had really achieved anything at all in his 20 years at the Council, apart from tieless Fridays and – when he was Cabinet Member for Housing - the end of Council housing as a humane accommodation option when he handed the management of it to a now-imploding Arms Length Management Organisation. The ALMO had just celebrated its first anniversary by announcing it couldn't afford to continue and would close at least five of the borough's ten area housing offices and replace them with a cheap and useless call-centre. That was the Deputy Mayor's only legacy.

'Fuck,' the Mayor exhaled, too lost in the hellish pictures in his head to realise he'd spoke out loud. The hundreds of staff in front of him looked on, thrilled.

Warmed up and undaunted, the Deputy Mayor powered on. 'It's about progress,' he announced to the crowded hall. 'It's about this Council in the millennium It's about taking the great skills that you people have and shaping them to the needs of today's Council customers. That's why we want you to think very seriously about the oppportunities that putting as many of you as we can into a frontline call-centre will offer you as Council officers. We don't need all of you as benefits officers and social workers and committee staff. We want you up front, where you can use your people-skills.'

The staff looked at each other in horror. The Cabinet members looked at each other in terror.

'Shut him up, for God's sake,' the Cabinet Member for Procurement hissed at the Mayor. 'They'll all get up and come after us.'

'Redundancy will be an option for many of you, of course,' the Deputy Mayor continued, apparently failing to notice that most of his audience was now on its feet and gesticulating. 'We don't believe that this Efficiency drive needs to mean a cut in service, though. People today want call-centres. They want Efficiency. They want to be able to contact the Council at any hour that they want. They want to be able to sit in front of their computers and pay their Council Tax and choose a library and bury their grandparents and all that kind of thing...'

In fact, this was only partly true. The Council had indeed surveyed borough residents about service delivery, and had found that more than 50% of respondents did want electronic government. The problem was that they wanted electronic government in addition to face-to-face, frontline services. The other problem was that comparatively few residents had been surveyed, or responded to questionnaires. Thousands of questionnaires went out, but only a few hundred came back. Rumour had it that most of the respondents were senior managers, too. Certainly, this was a rumour that everybody enjoyed spreading.

'The IT side of it and the management side of this part of our whole modernisation programme will be handled by our Strategic Partner,' the Deputy Mayor went on. 'Could you put your hands together for...'

People began to scream.

'What do you mean we're going to be working in a call-centre? I'm not working in a call-centre. I hate call-centres. I didn't go to university just to work in a call-centre.'

'You crazy bastard. The public hate call-centres. They don't work. You can never get through.'

'How are we supposed to work through a whole housing application over the phone with someone who doesn't speak English?'

'Are we going to have to take a pay cut? People get paid shit in call-centres. Are we going to take a pay cut? I bet management won't take a bloody pay cut...'

'What about teachers? What about the schools? Are you going to cut the smaller schools? Are you going to cut us all out?'

The hall was in chaos. A couple of shop-stewards from Housing Benefits stood up, pointed at the Deputy Mayor, and lauched a rousing chant of 'Out! Out! Out!.'

The Mayor and the Cabinet were looking a bit strung-out. What hope had they of selling their call-centre and Efficiencies notions to a skeptical voting public if the idea was terminally mauled this early in the game? Another problem was that many of the people screaming bloody murder in the hall at the moment WERE the voting public. Most of the Council's staff lived in the borough, and took a keen interest in local politics, not least because their livelihoods depended on it. Some of the borough's marginal wards were only held by five or ten votes. Pissing off a small division of ten staff could be fatal. Upsetting thousands would be unfortunate indeed.

The Mayor and the Cabinet stared at the Deputy Mayor in distress. The Deputy Mayor didn't see this, but he did seem to have finally picked up on the vibe.

'What you all need to understand,' he screamed over his shrieking audience, 'is that we need to get a call-centre underway and working properly if we're going to win the election. You people better listen to me,' the Deputy Mayor said again. His hand wander up to his neck – feeling, the Mayor presumed, for the missing tie. 'Are you listening? You need to listen to this. If we don't work together, the Dark Party will win the next election. That bloody dreadful Dark Party will get in here and they'll take over the government and none of us will bloody well like that.' The Deputy Mayor took a deep breath.

'We need to find a way of getting the message about this Council to everybody who votes,' he said. 'I want you people and you union members and the public you serve to know that we're friendly. We're local People's Party. We're not national People's Party. We're local People's Party. It's not like the national People's Party, and that's the point. It's local People's Party. It's different. Yes, what do you want?' he snapped, looking at the front row of audience. The branch secretary's hand was in the air.

The branch secretary stood up. 'I have to say that I think you're wrong,' she told the Deputy Mayor. 'I personally don't think you could make people see the difference between the local and national versions of yourself at gunpoint. They think that your People's Party Party is as nasty and anti-worker as the Dark Party. You've made our members redundant, closed our offices and cut services and paid these crazy consultants millions. Our members would stone us if we tried to tell them to support you lot. That's why we haven't really tried it.'

'Bloody right!' the crowd cheered.

'Siddown!' the Deputy Mayor shrieked, slamming his hand on the table with such force that everybody in the the first couple of rows in the Hall winced when he did. 'Your unions are affiliated to our Party - the People's Party. You will do what we tell you to do!'

The Out! Out! Out! chant started up again. Mayor placed a hand over his eyes.

'Jesus Christ,' he hissed at the Deputy Mayor. He tugged on the Deputy Mayor's suit tail. 'Don't wind them up any more. We'll have to find another way to do this. Come on. Let's end this for now.'

The Deputy Mayor looked down at the Mayor. 'We can't just walk out now,' he said to the Mayor, frowning. 'We'll be jeered out of the room. We'd have to run for it. That'll look even worse.'

'You think?' the Mayor asked, looking out at the baying crowd.

The Deputy Mayor turned to face the crowd again. He turned to the branch secretary and pointed at her.

'You need to remember that your union is affiliated to the People's Party,' he said coldly. 'We're asking for your support with this programme and we expect to get it. I'm sure your bosses at union headquarters would agree with me. As for the rest of you,' the Deputy Mayor continued, 'we need this call-centre and you need to get away from the idea that we've got the kind of money to spend that we used to. We don't have it any more. It's all got to end, and it will.'