Union responses to the offshoring of call centre work
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There have been common experiences for workers in the Anglo industrialized countries with respect to offshoring. This paper reflects upon the examples of Canada and Australia and examines how the call center industries in each respective country have been impacted by the offshoring of employment, how trade unions have responded and to what extent these responses have been effective. In Australia, trade unions have responded mainly by lobbying the Australian Labor Party for policy and legal changes. In Canada, despite being a country that has largely benefited from the offshoring of call centres, trade unions have nevertheless been compelled to fight for their members' job security. Offshoring has been used as a strategy by Canadian employers to desist industrial action organized by trade unions. The authors conclude that unions should engage in consumer mobilization and labour action to respond to offshoring.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.030 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".