The Phone Book: Working at the Bell

If you believe the advertisements, Bell Canada is in the business of putting grannies in touch with their loved ones, helping blind kids play baseball, and generally making it easier for society to "communicate." In this book, Joan Newman Kuyek presentes a different story - a story of stifling bureaucracy, of increasingly fragmented and dehumanizing jobs, of the elimination of workers through changing technology, of flashy corporate expansion abroad and declining service at home. It's a story that reveals what lies behind the rate increases demanded almost annually in the last decade. It does much to explain the struggle for unionization and the wave of strikes that recently hit the phone company. The Phone Book is an "inside view" of work at the Bell. Joan Kuyek speaks from personal experience - she spent nearly three years as a Bell service representative, and interviewed dozens of her co-workers, operators, service representatives, installers and others, for the book. --Publisher's description

OCLC: 6377340