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Perhaps it is the stress of dealing with cranky members of the public. Or maybe they are just bunking off to escape the sheer boredom of sitting in front of a computer screen, day in, day out. But whatever the reason, it emerged yesterday that people who work in customer services, including call centre operators, are more likely to call in sick than any other workers in Britain.
Official data from the Office of National Statistics found customer service workers almost twice as likely to take time off sick as the average employee. In the survey, 4.8% had taken at least a day off in the previous week, compared with the national average of 2.5%. It certainly might explain those long waits, listening to the hold music, receiver pressed to your ear.
An inquiry to the Call Centre Management Association, to see if anyone might hazard a guess as to why the industry suffers an unusually high number of sick days, was met with an answer machine.
Karen Darby, a call centre veteran who founded the price comparison service SimplySwitch, was not surprised by the figures and said they had little to do with call centre workers being more sickly than average. "It is a reflection of the type of people who work in call centres," she said. "They are notoriously underpaid and, you know, if you pay peanuts ...
"Absenteeism and attrition are the two biggest issues you face. Not many people will admit this but some call centres will go through 100% staff turnover every year."
Claudia Hathway, editor of Call Centre Focus magazine, was a little more sympathetic. "It is an incredibly stressful job. They are on the phone dealing with quite complex problems and often people who are not very happy that they are calling you."
In total, the quarterly Labour Force Survey from the ONS showed that 5.8m sick days were taken across the country last year. Women (2.9%) are more likely to go off sick than men (2.2%). Younger age groups, doubtless plagued by hangovers, are also more likely to be off than older workers.
Public sector workers are off sick far more frequently than those who work in the private sector, 2.9% against 2.4%. Sickness rates among civil servants are even higher, at 3.5%.
Perhaps a little surprisingly for disgruntled commuters, only 0.8% of transport workers, including train drivers, pilots and air traffic controllers, had taken any time off - making them the most reliable workers in the country.
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