Following the money.

A few weeks ago, we at Bwog received an interesting and moderately disturbing tip about the Columbia Calling Center, a fairly popular place for first years to work to earn a little bit of extra money:

“Could you investigate what’s going on with the columbia calling center? There’s this thread on b@b that’s talking about this columbia-run calling center that has students ask alums for money. The entire thread is here: https://boredatbutler.com/post/4275007.

The post that got my attention was this one: ‘the callers are majority poor african american students, at least when i was there. many of them would not be able to pay for tuition without the job. to make matters worse, alums on the phone tended to respond better to my phone habits/diction/tone/general phone presence, so i easily got more donations and was praised by their supervisor. it made me feel shitty and out of my element, especially since i was basically just there for beer money.'”

We knew it was our duty to investigate these allegations and ensure that no scandal was overlooked nor false rumor propagated. The Columbia Calling Center, located on 113th street, advertises itself (as places looking to attract employees are wont to do) as a “fun, student friendly atmosphere” and a “meaningful and worthwhile cause.” Much more appealing to the students who apply, however, is the advertised pay of $12.75 an hour. One of our anonymous interviewees described his job as “I make calls to alumni attempting to get them to donate to our annual fund, mostly for financial aid and scholarships.” It is a necessary job, even if it is somewhat uncomfortable to ask strangers for money. With a basic understanding of the structure and function of the Calling Center, we began to ask about the workplace environment.

One friend of Bwog gave an account of life at the calling center over the Internet which corroborated some of the claims from the anonymous tip: “I heard they used to make people stand up if they didn’t get alums to donate but they stopped doing that once I joined… If anything the alums were just pretty bad and would sometimes say racist things or hate on Columbia.”

Our two in-person interviewees, however, denied having heard anything about this. One student, who had been working at the calling center for only a few weeks, confirmed that there was a quota but that there was no public humiliation or punishment for not reaching it. Rather, he told us that they gave out candy for meeting the quotas or improving work performance and that “it’s all very positive… [When you don’t reach your quota] they just tell us, and it’s like ‘oh, better luck next time’. There’s no shaming involved”. The other interviewee, a female student who had been working there for over a year, corroborated his account, albeit with a less optimistic attitude. “It’s not, like, a strict quota, and if I started caring about it I’d probably hate myself.” Performance evaluation, they both said, included occasionally listening in on calls and grading them on certain things, and bonuses were awarded based on seniority and not performance. Most people who work there, however, are freshmen who have just started. The interviewee who had worked there for over a year said that “there aren’t many who make it to a year, because it’s very strict in when you can schedule your shifts”.

The racial and socioeconomic makeup of the calling center was an interesting question. Of course, with a pay of $12.75 an hour and a time commitment of at least nine hours a week, it makes sense that people who needed money would be drawn to that place. Our male interviewee claimed that they were “pretty diverse as a call center”, and noted that “mostly women work there, but I think that’s just a coincidence”. When asked about the socioeconomic diversity, he said “I haven’t asked. But I do know that some of my coworkers are on financial aid, and there are some graduate students.” The female interviewee who had worked there longer, on the other hand, asserted that the people who worked at the calling center were “mostly kids who really need the money. Over the summer there was even one guy who was from the Bronx and he was commuting to the calling center and he had two other jobs as well.”

What does the socioeconomic status of the workers mean? If the employees were as maltreated as the anonymous b@b thread asserted, it would be a disturbing instance of poorer students being forced by economic necessity into an abusive workplace environment while the administration looked on indifferently. However, if conditions at the calling center are as described by our interviewees, it would just mean that the calling center is a good place for students and community members to earn a decent wage on a part-time basis.

Overall the people who we interviewed were not particularly excited about calling random strangers to ask for money for the school, but they did not find their jobs to be intolerable. The female student who had worked there for over a year told us, when asked if she liked her job, that she was trying to find a new one. “At first it was sort of interesting, the challenge of trying to convince people,” she said, “but now I’m applying for a [position that pays better]”.

Now, to be clear, this does not mean that the allegations from the original tip are necessarily false. We had a limited selection of interviewees who could only speak to their own experiences and who could not know whether the workplace environment at the Calling Center was different and more abusive before their time. But for now at least, the claims are unsubstantiated. If you have any information about the calling center, or about anything else that you would like to see investigated, submit a tip to Bwog!

Getting paid via Wikimedia.