I’ve been talking to someone working on test and trace in a call centre subcontracted to Serco. Here’s what this person told me.
Until last week, the workers at the call centre were doing the simplest job in the tracing chain, calling those who have been identified as
contacts of infected people and telling them to isolate themselves for 14 days, giving them some scripted advice and collecting a small amount of data. But last week, the call centre announced that all the workers on this contract were being “upskilled”. Instead of making these simple calls, they would now be calling
infected patients and discovering all their contacts over the past fortnight. To use the official terms, they have suddenly been promoted from
level 3 call handlers to level 2 clinical contact caseworkers.
But the workers at the call centre who have been “upskilled” to this level are mostly
school-leavers and students, with no relevant qualifications. While the job is officially advertised at between £16.97 and £27.15 per hour, they are all being paid the minimum wage, which means £6.45 for the 18- to 20-year-olds (most of them) and £8.72 for over-25s.
Serco issued an internal notice explaining this change, which was leaked to the press. From 21 October, it said, “a number of experienced agents from Serco and Sitel will assist with index case tracing”.
What it didn’t say is that some of these “experienced agents” are 18 years old. The “appropriate training” for the magical transformation to “experienced clinician” lasted four hours. It was conducted remotely, as they now work from home, and consisted of a PowerPoint presentation, an online conversation, a quiz, some e-learning modules and some new call scripts.
So how has it gone? During the first hour of the first day, three of the young tracers called people who had just lost someone they loved to Covid-19. The people they spoke to were in extreme distress. After these calls, all three tracers “were distraught and crying”, and unable to work for the rest of the day.