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Voice service providers, mainly at 114 telephony service and home shopping call centers, have been suffering from severe insults such as vocal sexual harassment from male callers.
Data of the National Human Rights Commission show that there are about 800,000 voice service workers at 35,000 establishments in Korea as of 2009. They are suffering from a variety of language violence, such as abuse, sexual harassment and questions difficult to answer.
According to KT Innovative Solution (KTIS), a 114 call center of KT, the nation’s largest wired telephony firm, the service providers have been inflicted with 1,700 bad calls, such as language violence, sexual harassment and threats a month on average.
Language violence and abuse account for 45.6 percent with 796 cases, followed by threat to kill with 426 cases and pranks with 428 and sexual harassment with 96.
As most of the service providers are female, they are inflicted with sexual harassment most. They make obscene jokes, groan and even request sex.
A consult of KTIS said that she suffered sexual harassment incurring severe sexual humiliation which can hardly be transformed to written form. “This time, it was too gloomy to look at the face of my husband due to shame enough to commit suicide although I think I have got accustomed to such a thing,” said a female worker at the 114 call center of KTIS.
Low pay is another factor to make the voice service providers hard to bear.
Monthly pay of call center consultants is 1,342,000 won on average, accounting for 70 percent of the average in all the industries. As a result, service period has been 3.1 years on average, one third of the average in all industries.
To help the consultants be relieved of stress, KTIS has installed a rest room, where female workers can rest or do boxing for 10 minutes after 40-minute work, a KTIS spokesperson said.
“In general, Koreans demand more excessive kindness in the voice service sector than in foreign countries,” said Kim eun-mi, chief of the section on survey of discrimination at the National Human Rights Commission. “It needs to review the way of providing service in social level.”
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