OVER THE LAST few years, I’ve started to do volunteer work for a number of national and international companies. It started off quite slowly. I’m a mother of two young kids and I have a full-time job, so spare time is not something I’ve got a lot of. But lately the work has picked up. 

I don’t really like this volunteer work because I always do it in business hours or after school pick-ups, the times when I’m busiest. But I’m lucky to have a full-time job that has semi-flexible hours so that when my volunteer work intrudes upon my working hours, I can just work longer. I’m fortunate that way. 

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve added two more companies to the list. I didn’t intend to, and if I’d been told all the terms and conditions from the outset, I would have said, ‘No, thank you.’ If there’s a formal recruitment practice, I haven’t encountered it. But here we are. 

One is a large electronics manufacturer, with over a hundred billion dollars in revenue and a workforce of who-knows-how-many-millions of people. I should add that the workforce is made up of people who get paid, as well as people like me, who are working for free. The other company I started volunteering at is an Australian company that also earns a huge profit each year. Again, same deal: some paid employees, but a labour force made up mostly of volunteers. 

There are so many companies like this – for example, the big department store I gave an hour’s work to earlier this year. None of my paid co-workers were rostered on to the luggage department that day, and none of the other paid workers knew enough about luggage to help me. It was a Sunday, and I was told that the luggage person wasn’t usually rostered to work weekends. Too expensive, I imagine. So, I got to work. I sat myself down in the corner of the luggage department and spent some time on the internet, trying to find the best kind of suitcases for my work trip. My whole family was there, so my husband tried to keep the kids entertained while I did comparisons of all the luggage this shop offered. Another volunteer turned up, also looking for luggage, so I was able to share the information I found with her. Many hands, as the saying goes, make light work.

In the last fortnight, other volunteer work has consisted of going into a store to do a product comparison, spending forty minutes on hold to another store, finding two head office numbers and sharing them with fellow volunteers, spending twenty minutes waiting for a chatbot to answer me, spending ten minutes crafting a finely worded email only to be given the same wrong answer twice by a chatbot masquerading as a human (which I responded to for fear I’d be kicked out of the system and have to start all over again), keeping a log of a previous phonecall and supplying the new person on the end of the line with the notes I’d kept of my earlier phone meeting so they could update their notes. In the end, I also wound up negotiating with the service company they employed so my concerns could (now) be raised in a timely manner.

That’s not all. I’ve performed peer reviews on my paid colleagues, and I’ve also provided feedback on the systems my bosses use. I’ve provided ratings on the products I’ve bought or the services I’ve accessed. I’ve had to stay home at certain times and face responses from my co-workers when I point out I actually have a paying job and that, really, it does come first. I’ve also had to assemble furniture myself (which is not part of my skill set, I should add). For years, I did it for a big European company that keeps its overheads low, and now I voluntarily do this for any furniture maker I shop from, no matter how pricey.

It’s hard to remain temperate when you’re working for free. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s had to watch my tone when trying to get their paid co-workers to offer more help. I’m constantly reminded, by an automated recording, that I need to speak nicely to these workers, that rudeness will not be tolerated. And sometimes, after hours of chatbots and fake emails and even more chatbots, I’m tired. I sound curt and annoyed. This often happens when I can see my paid work hours stretching on through dinner time, or when my kids are asking for my help or attention, but I don’t want to hang up the phone lest I lose the only human I’ve encountered who might be able to help me. So, I always make sure I apologise to my paid co-workers. I tell them it’s not their fault. I’m not angry at them; I’m angry at our employer, who does not have enough paid employees in furniture showrooms, department stores or customer care to support them. I would like the employer to stop asking so very much of us both. 

I DON’T REMEMBER when I started this volunteer work. It could have been ten or fifteen years ago, when I scanned my first trolleyful of shopping at my local supermarket. It was novel at first, sliding the barcodes over the scanner, hearing the satisfying beep. I was young, then, before kids and a full-time job. I didn’t mind. But since then, there have been times when my children have grown cranky when I’ve done this work, and I’ve found it hard to juggle a toddler on my hip and find the code for bananas. I look for paid co-workers at these times, but they’re usually busy helping some other poor volunteer. And I feel for them, too, because there isn’t enough of them to go around. 

I realise that I’m luckier than lots of my co-volunteers. I’m familiar with computers. I know how to look things up on the internet. Unlike some other volunteers, I don’t do shift work, I’m not elderly, and I’m not doing hours and hours of care work every day. Still, I’d like to quit my volunteer jobs. All of them. They do not, as they say, spark joy. In fact, they make me tired and irritable. I just want them to stop. 

OF COURSE, I’M being tongue in cheek with my casting of all this activity as volunteering, perhaps to give myself a measure of control over a situation that seems to be getting out of hand. But more and more, these interactions with companies feel like unpaid labour, something I don’t think we should have to be doing. If my mattress feels completely different from the one I tested in the store, I don’t know why that’s my problem to solve. If my washing machine becomes faulty and the small company that the large multinational company uses to fix it doesn’t actually fix it, why do I have to spend hours of my life going back and forth between the two? If my phone company refuses to recognise that their automated system put down the wrong address for us – even if we have screenshots to prove it was not our mistake – why do I have to make call after call trying to get them to resolve a problem not of my own making? 

I know I’m not the only one who’s had to devote hours of their precious time to getting companies to fix mistakes and to refund or exchange faulty products. According to the 2023 Australian Consumer Survey, ‘61% of consumers have experienced at least one problem when purchasing a product or service over the past two years.’ 

A 2024 website post from CHOICE confirms this trend: ‘In a survey of over 6,000 CHOICE supporters in May this year, 73% told us they had encountered sub-par service from a business in the preceding year, and 85% believed this assistance was getting worse.’ 

These numbers seem to indicate the growing distance that corporations are placing between themselves and their customers. If the invention of the call centre in the mid-twentieth century helped this phenomenon along, then the creation of AI chatbots has only accelerated the issue in an alarming way. 

An article in The Guardian tells us this is not a uniquely Australian problem. Anna Tims writes that ‘a report by the thinktank New Britain last month found that 78% of people across the country feel frustrated when dealing with customer services’. Her articles on consumer problems feature horrendous stories of corporate neglect. From disabled pensioners being stranded in foreign countries without their medication to banks erroneously closing customer accounts and energy companies failing to turn on a customer’s gas, leaving her family to shiver through a British winter, there’s no shortage of horror stories. 

But what makes these stories so bad is the underlying issue of corporate neglect. Staff forgetting to wheel a disabled woman onto a plane is bad enough, but the fact that the provider refused to refund the customer the price of the missed flight is another level of shoddy service. The mistake is easy enough to make. Refusing to do anything about it is something else entirely. In fact, the refusal to take responsibility or offer care and assistance is very, very deliberate. 

Writing for The Atlantic, Chris Colin recently detailed the terrifying story of having a newly purchased car stop working mid-drive. His steering wheel locked up, and his brakes failed to work. After getting out of the car, and having it towed to a mechanic, he suffered a 108-day ordeal of trying to get the car fixed or returned. Colin endured what many of us endure in these situations – dropped calls, unanswered emails, scheduled callbacks that never materialise. He recalls having to tell the same story over and over again to whoever happened to pick up his calls. In researching similar experiences, he also came across the concept of ‘sludge’, originally articulated by legal scholar Cass R Sunstein. Colin categorises sludge as ‘tortuous administrative demands, endless wait times, and excessive procedural fuss that impede us in our lives’. 

What Colin discovered is that sludge is not accidental; it’s curated and created to stop customers getting satisfactory outcomes for issues with products and providers. He interviewed Amas Tenumah, author of the book Waiting for Service: An Insider’s Account of Why Customer Service Is Broken + Tips to Avoid Bad Service (2021), who confirmed that a lack of customer care is incentivised by management. Call-centre workers might be told to keep calls under a certain number of minutes; they’ll be rewarded for not passing calls up to their supervisors or for keeping to claims targets. In short, they’re directed to add roadblocks to the process to protect company profits. 

Reading about these instances, and the policies that inform them, is rage-inducing. As I was trawling through the academic literature on chatbots in customer care, it seemed that article after article had been published to help corporations use chatbots in ways that customers find less infuriating – using emojis, apparently, makes us feel more warmly towards these interactions. One recent article, in the Journal of Service Theory and Practice, detailed how ‘analysing customers’ relational, cognitive, affective and behavioural reactions’ could guide managers on ‘how to develop strategies for handling positive and negative effects’ in customer experiences. Here we see that negative encounters are not a problem to be solved in and of themselves. Instead, they’re fodder for whatever iteration of ‘customer service’ might come our way next. 

In Australia, it seems we’re feeling this lack of concern. The 2023 Australian Consumer Survey also states that 40 per cent of respondents sense that businesses don’t care, and 34 per cent said businesses refused to accept fault. The issue of sludge is also relevant, with 16 per cent of respondents saying ‘they could not get hold of the business or manufacturer after finding the issue’. All of these numbers had increased since the 2016 survey, but the last one had tripled in that time. 

What’s worrying is that these practices are having a profound effect – not on businesses but on consumers. There’s been a 10 per cent drop in consumers taking action to resolve their issues because of ‘the perception that it will take a lot of effort’. The report also shows that fewer than half of customers are satisfied with their resolutions. One wonders if these numbers are based only on the outcome, or if they also take into consideration the gruelling journey that consumers undertake to resolve an issue. As CHOICE reports, ‘large numbers of Australians are experiencing poor customer service and many of us feel the standard of support provided by businesses is getting worse.’ 

In the face of poor customer service and ever-increasing amounts of sludge poured between us and the solution, many people are simply not prepared to try to get their issues fixed at all, preferring to put up with faulty products or replace them themselves, all of which helps no one but the companies. 

We can guess why this issue is now so pervasive. Writing in 2019, Anthony Dukes and Yi Zhu posited that terrible customer experiences continue to proliferate because it’s profitable for the companies who engage in them. As time goes on, we’re seeing the propagation of huge companies, which results in a lack of choice in the market for consumers. When you have just a couple of supermarkets to shop from, you’re more likely to shop at the one that treats you less shittily. The shift in language from ‘customer’ to ‘consumer’ doesn’t help much either – more and more, we’re seen less as people and increasingly as individual markets to capture. Colin posits that part of the issue is the way CEO tenures have become shorter; for this reason, they prioritise returns to shareholders and investors over building their customer base. Tims concurs, stating that the companies who rank most highly in the UK Customer Satisfaction Index are not owned by shareholders. She writes: ‘When shareholder dividends are not the primary focus, investment can prioritise customer care over quick profits.’ 

Tims also points out that in the UK, people spend ‘between 28 and 41 minutes every week dealing with (companies) in lengthy battles’. And these numbers are based only on those willing to put in the work. 

ALL THIS BRINGS us back to the fact that wading through this sludge is a form of labour – one that’s not being remunerated. Moreover, it’s time wrested away from the other things we have to do: paid labour and care work. If someone bothered to ask us if we’d be willing to donate between twenty-eight and forty-one minutes to help create profits for investors and shareholders, our answer, quite naturally, would likely be an emphatic no. 

I’ve always envisaged volunteering at some point in my life, when I’m no longer working full time and the kids are old enough to need me less urgently. I’d like to volunteer for organisations that help integrate refugees. Or teach creative writing to people who can’t afford to pay for classes. I could volunteer to a helpline or cook meals for people who need them. This is the kind of volunteer work I think would actually matter to my community, the kind of work that could do the most good. 

By contrast, volunteering for these corporations does not feel like giving back to my community. I don’t think I’m making the world a kinder place by measuring my mattress or scanning groceries. I don’t think my community is being well served by my feedback on products and services. And I worry about a great fatigue settling over all of us when we do so much volunteer work for these profit-hungry corporations. I’d like to call someone and complain, but I haven’t yet found their number. 

_{Image: Mitchell Luo from Unsplash}