The video clip above is subtitled but it’s well worth watching all the way through. The clip presents a rare, realistic view of what it means to be a “Customer Service Representative” or “CSR.” What’s more, the video was produced by the workers themselves, not the corporation hawking the photos of fakey smiling faces happily meeting your every need.

The CSRs in this clip eventually did try to organize their call center (that is, they tried to install a labor union). Similar organization efforts have taken place in call centers around the world in recent years, including the U.S. (AT & T and Verizon call centers have both been targets of organizing efforts), but what typically happens in the case of call center worker attempts at organization is that, when all is said and done, the corporation simply shuts the call center down without warning and moves it somewhere it thinks a union can’t wriggle in.

I personally worked with a call center rep for Verizon who won “Employee of the Year” one day, and the very next day was unemployed because the center was shut down. So she came to our call center, where she was quickly every bit as miserable as she was at her last pretend job.

Maybe you’re thinking, “OK Pam, but why should I care?”

We all know these jobs suck. We all get irritated that we have to navigate twelve-tier phones menus every single time we have a problem with a product or service or bank account or cell phone or computer or what have you, just to get to a person who can’t help us and is required to sell us something else.

We make jokes about these jobs. Many people wrongly assume that most call centers are located off the shores of the United States and go on to blame the workers for not speaking clear English and for enforcing unfriendly corporate policies of non-service, thus inconveniencing callers even further than the stupid phone menu already has. (When I was working the phones—for EIGHT YEARS—the two most frequent questions I got were, “Are you a machine?” and “Are you in the U.S.?”)

But did you know that call center jobs are the single largest category of employment for downsized American workers today? And that’s if they are lucky? Corporations have learned that offshore call centers anger and irritiate Americans with money, so many corporations are now moving their call centers back to the U.S. More importantly, call center jobs are one of the few jobs available in the U.S. today that a person without a specific professional or technical skill can still get.

It’s also not true that everyone who works in a call center is a flunky. During my stint in corporate call centers I worked with a downsized radio announcer, a downsized psychologist, a dozen downsized insurance agents who once made four times as much money, half a dozen real estate agents, a minister, and a wide assortment of dental assistants and medical techs who could not get any other job. I myself have a BA and a master’s degree and once taught college. Two of the editors at Eye on Life are former call center employees with college educations.

Good manufacturing jobs are not coming back. The U.S. auto industry has been gutted and those jobs are no longer what they were for our fathers and grandfathers. Not everyone can be a nurse. Installing solar panels and caulking windows is only going to keep ‘x’ number of persons busy for ‘x’ number of years. By many accounts the U.S. is looking at a long period of reduced opportunity and status during which there are way more workers than jobs, and the jobs available are not sufficient to provide a decent standard of living for a single person, never mind a family of four.

A recent TV interview with a U.S. ‘employment expert’ revealed that call center work is one of the fastest growing and neediest fields out there. In fact, U.S. call centers get so desperate for fresh meat that (according to this particular expert) many call centers are not just willing but are eager to place ex-convicts in these jobs. In fact, some convicts still serving time are put to work in prison call centers for pennies per hour (making airline reservations).

How big a step is it from placing ex-convicts in call center jobs to convicting people of petty crimes so they can staff prison call centers? Is anybody out there at all uncomfortable with this brave new world?

Today, the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and most of this has happened concurrent with the financial deregulation that moved vast amounts of money from the middle class to the uppermost half of one percent of Americans. Between 1980 and today the number of people in U.S. prisons moved from 500,000 to nearly two and half million, and that rate is increasing. Only half are imprisoned for violent crime. In fact, privatized prisons are now, like call centers, one of the few growth industries in the U.S.

If you can’t get yourself incarcerated, the good news is, you do have a decent shot at a job incarcerating others.

(Hey, at least it’s not call center work.)

If you hate your job and it appears that no other jobs are available, what can you do? Many advise that the best course is to suck it up and be grateful for your misery, put your head down, put up with anything, and soldier on, but having been in that position myself, I’m not so sure this is good advice.

The world is changing and it is changing fast. For some parts of the world like India and China, these changes, challenging as they are, represent new opportunity and increased national and personal wealth. As manufacturing and technical jobs move to poor nations, their standard of living improves and ours declines.

For the U.S., the twenty year trend has been toward ever-lower individual incomes, an overall reduced standard of living, and fewer opportunities for advancement or change.

Should we all just suck it up and grab a hairnet or a headset? Or should we take this opporunity (when nearly 20% of us are unemployed, underemployed, or unemployable and hopeless anyway) to take a seriuos look at work and what it means, what it has meant in the past, and what it should mean to us today as Americans? My view is that we should question the current corporate model that sings the virtues of products that aren’t products, customer service that isn’t service, and web content that has no content.

If we ask the right questions, we just might get some answers.

Stay tuned.