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“This question could end up in court and is beyond your pay grade”
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I was thinking again today about the decision that held Air Canada responsible for the garbage spewed by its “customer service” chatbot, as I tried repeatedly to explain a very precise question to a call-centre agent. Likely under-paid. Definitely under-supported.
I asked to be transferred to either her “superior” (her word) or to legal. I said in these actual literal words “this question could end up in court and is beyond your pay grade” but her “superiors” still refused to take the transfer.
She was very pleasant, even as the call went on and on and on and I kept repeating that the question she was answering was not the one I was asking.
I’m sure she could barely hear me; there were many people talking in the room she was working from. (Likely under-ventilated.)
Even where audio is good, it is frustratingly common for a questionee to register only a few key words before hitting play on a pre-packaged response.
Maybe this is sufficient / efficient most of the time, for most customers, for most questions.
But I had already:
- Logged in to get as much information as I could on my own,
- Checked out (1) the FAQs and (2) the community, and
- Attempted to find / generate an answer using their online “assistant.”
This phone call was my last step, not my first. But it honestly sounded like their “customer service” model is to cram people into a room to type the same obvious keywords into the “assistant” and then read the (inapplicable) answers (inaudibly). It was frustrating.
When I asked again to be escalated, the same agent came back to tell me something wasn’t possible because of privacy. I had to explain that doesn’t even make sense to say to the customer who has the privacy interest to waive. Still her “superiors” would not let her pass the call on.
Eventually it seemed my actual question was being understood. The answer still came back no. “No” feels legally incorrect.
And I have no doubt that if this does indeed get to court and the answer is actually yes, their corporate and legal will again try to dump the problem on the minimum-wage employee reading the chatbot aloud.
(Are server rooms better ventilated than call centres?)
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Punishing individuals for societal failures
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I tried private practice once, criminal defence law specifically. I didn’t last very long at it.
In part this was because I was brand new and the learning culture was more sink or swim than mentoring. I remember getting berated once by the person on the bench – presumably into the record – because I had not promptly appeared in their courtroom, which was because I was trapped in another courtroom. My attempts to explain this were seen as disrespectful; my role was to stand there quietly and get berated for structural problems.
Another factor was that it was just so depressing. The clients were, for the most part, people who needed life help but were instead getting criminalized. The only help I could offer was getting them out on bail but, in the absence of food and shelter and mental health services and actual choice, they often just got slapped with more charges including now, as a bonus, breach of conditions. It was a revolving door of human misery and it was pointless. All of that money could have been spent helping them, but instead we punished them for society’s failures.
I did a research paper about drug treatment courts once, for the John Howard Society of Canada, with the guidance of the indefatigable and kind Graham Stewart (then Executive Director). If I recall correctly, what I read showed that people remain under the supervision of the court for longer this way than when they plead out, which is intrusive. I think I also learned that outcomes are better when a person has access to high-quality voluntary addiction services than when they are shunted into services via the criminal law system, and that voluntary services are cheaper too, without that added layer of government involvement. But good luck, person in need, getting easy access to preventive, voluntary, high-quality mental health services when most of the budget goes to cops and “correctional” institutions and their surveillance and control tech.
Then I spent years on Parliament Hill, where I learned that even politicians whose rhetoric is compassion and evidence and results will knowingly throw money away to punish people rather than help them. The problem was not, it turned out, that they were unaware.
We do, as a society, love to punish people for things that are beyond their control.
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Paying people for their work
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I was very stubborn at someone today re: the principle that they deserved to be paid for their work.
I’ve been seeing a lot of reluctance to this idea, including from government workers who are expected to donate their own time and resources to their employer, effectively subsidizing their own jobs.
It blows my mind that “payment for labour” is a radical position under capitalism. Or maybe it’s technically an accepted position but “labour” has been defined to exclude basic human facts and also all sorts of effort.
People are so used to being extracted from as part of the “bargain” of a job, which often begins with the usually unpaid, often absurd gauntlet that is the hiring process. I think this creates an expectation and a culture of employees doing unpaid labour, particularly when and where everything feels precarious.
We make exceptions, because we care. We devote extra hours and bankroll work supplies. Sometimes we perform significant emotional labour for clients or coworkers or even management. We sacrifice our “free” time to be a team player or a workhorse. We are expected to smile infinitely, even where work doesn’t pay enough to live, even where our health is suffering.
I doubt I can succeed at convincing governments and corporations to care about their workers and customers more than their money. But I can insist on personally living the radical principle that people deserve to be paid for their work.
I’m sorry that this makes people uncomfortable.
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A short chronology
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27 March 2024: Voilà sends me an email about the day’s delivery, with fine print about bags that includes the concluding statement: “Bag charges reflect actual number of bags accepted at delivery.”
27 March 2024: I point out that I did not “accept” four bags that they nonetheless charged me for: “Please refund the difference and ensure your drivers are made aware of the importance of complying with your own legal fine print.”
2 April 2024: Voilà sends me an email about the day’s delivery where the fine print about bags does not include the concluding statement about bag charges reflecting bags “accepted” by the customer.
One possible explanation is that this is not a change but rather a discrepancy, because the first email was in English and the second one was in French. Sometimes translators miss a sentence. This explanation seems unlikely, though, because their service is uncommonly good in both languages.
Another possible explanation is that they realized I was right and the easiest solution was just to delete the sentence from the standard language in their emails.
I think that makes sense. It was inconsistent with the “terms and conditions” on their website anyway: “By completing the checkout and submitting an order through Voilà, you are agreeing to pay, in full, the prices of the items selected (or any substitutions accepted by you) and all applicable charges (such as charges for bags, deposits, delivery fees, etc), taxes, by credit card or other permitted payment method.”
(I did a comparison using the wayback machine and that sentence does not appear to have changed recently.)
The outcome I wanted was for them to uphold the fine print in their email and stop forcing expensive waste on customers, but it looks like at best I have annoyed them into deleting a sentence that could be used against them.
So far, anyway. My other two arguments remain good.
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Societal untruths
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On this April first I’m thinking about some of the different ways society encourages or enables us to deceive each other.
There’s April Fools’ Day, of course, and there’s Santa Claus. Government entities like NORAD and Canada Post even get in on that “benevolent” lie.
And then there is Parliamentary privilege, which includes immunity for speech made during official proceedings:
The privilege of freedom of speech in parliamentary proceedings is generally regarded as the most important of the privileges enjoyed by members of Parliament. This right is protected by the Constitution Act, 1867, and the Parliament of Canada Act.
Freedom of speech permits members to speak freely in the conduct of a proceeding of Parliament, such as in the Chamber during a sitting or in committees during meetings, while enjoying complete immunity from prosecution or civil liability for any comment they make. In order to encourage truthful and complete disclosure without fear of reprisal or other adverse actions as a result of their testimony, this right is also extended to individuals who appear before the House or its committees. The House of Commons could not work effectively unless its members, and witnesses appearing before House committees, were able to speak and criticize without being held to account by any outside body.
Here this is presented ideally, as a way to encourage truth. It is my observation that what in fact results is a lack of accountability. Parliamentarians taunt and dare each other to repeat inflammatory statements outside the Chamber, while being procedurally discouraged from calling something a lie. The Speaker of the House has also declined, despite being the inside body, to hold MPs accountable for the accuracy of their statements: “I can determine neither their veracity nor their consistency with prior statements.” This is how this revered institution handles truth.
And then journalists are corporately and culturally expected to maintain “balance” in their reporting, an appearance of neutrality between truth and codswallop.1
I once again wonder what principles we’re serving, and I worry about the scope of less obvious societal untruths.2
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- I would like my partner to know that I originally wrote “bullshit” here but then, with him in mind, edited it to “codswallop,” since that doubles as a joke about unparliamentary language. ↩︎
- In preparing this post, I also enjoyed reading “The House of Commons is a sham,” a 2011 piece by Aaron Wherry in Macleans about how effectively this revered institution is working. ↩︎
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About the author
CKirkby
- earned degrees in language / literature and law (but is not currently a lawyer or a journalist);
- worked for over a decade on Parliament Hill;
- misses writing; and
- appreciates thoughtful comments, en anglais ou en français. (Email addresses are not published.)
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