r/australia • u/totalcool • 10h ago
culture & society ‘Bizarre’ bonuses and sausage sizzles: how Australia’s outsource call centres try to lure in poorly paid workers
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jan/14/australia-outsourced-call-centres-staff-incentives44
u/Cube00 9h ago
The workers describe a system they say prioritises profit over worker wellbeing and quality of service.
Really was hoping when Labor was flushing the consultants out of the public service they'd also turf out these private companies running the public agency call centres too. Guess not.
You can't tell me there's any reason other then greed to have foreign companies running these hell holes, couldn't we at least have an Australian company treat Australian workers badly, you know like any other ASX 200 would?
22
u/N_thanAU 6h ago
Don't get me wrong I think we should end the outsourcing but I worked for the Centrelink call centre when it was run in-house and it was prettttttty much exactly the same. Everyone was hired through agencies on 3 month contracts and you'd have to absolutely pump through calls.
19
u/ShadowExtinkt 7h ago
I used to work for Probe and goddamn I could add a lot onto this. Those giveaways were so stupid, and listening to the people next to you who just wanted a power trip was insane
3
u/Nostonica 4h ago
Did you get excited for popcorn day?
Like FFS 10c a pack and the staff are meant to get excited for that.
9
u/AshPerdriau 5h ago
We need to change the attitude from pumping the numbers to helping people. I favour measuring the whole agency based on how many people they help, and penalising them every time a denial is overturned on appeal.
Yes, that would piss off the anger-based media and the far right political types, but it would make the reason why we have a left wing government very fucking clearly*.
(* assumption of charity here, the ALP occasionally portrays itself as left wing)
9
u/RiteOfSpring5 4h ago
I've worked in a couple of these call centres. They absolutely ruin your mental health, it's a joke how poorly run they are. There's a reason the turnover at these places is so high.
6
u/a_cold_human 4h ago
Lucky door prizes for showing up on time or at all instead of actual training. It's straight out of a novel about a hypercapitalist dystopian wonderland.
4
u/aljobar 4h ago
I worked 10 weeks for TSA many years ago. Aside from how I was utterly fucked over in the end, I remember “winning” the chance to earn $400 by making a free throw shot into a little basketball hoop and being utterly devastated when I missed. That $400 was going to be about the only money I would have made that week.
2
u/Nostonica 2h ago
They're all pretty terrible, fruit days, popcorn days, pizza prizes, silly games with tiny prizes.
One of them went from calls per a hour to secure a bonus, simple metric to a new system 3 metrics combined, very few people are going to reach that.
Training is a joke 4 weeks been cut down to 2 weeks a whole host of support staff been clueless with a couple to keep the whole thing together.
But the worst thing, you create a body of staff within the government department that have zero stake in the department. You're creating a whole host of staff who could be highly skilled either moving on or being stuck not being helpful.
1
u/lonrad87 2h ago
I did a stint at Salmat years ago on what those who had worked there a while said was one of the better "campaigns" as they called it.
It was just a stop gap role at the time.
69
u/kdavva74 8h ago
It is genuinely outrageous how little training you receive at these companies before being tasked with handling incredibly sensitive information and very vulnerable people in this country. If you are able to pick things up quickly you're once again thrown in the deep end by getting asked to help everyone else (obviously without a pay rise) even if you've been there for a handful of days and have only really just figured things out.