I started working in LLS call center in DR in 2005 right out of college and at the beginning it was a great place to work, pay was good and the workload and enviorment was very good. I got training for 2 weeks before starting to work and I had to take a pass a test before I could take actual calls, the quality of the interpreters was very good, I actually went from CSI (customer service Interpreter) to CSI + to ALLCALL interpreter in less than six month. Then the hiring ethics change, it became all about quantity instead of quality and as many others had said the call volume is ridiculous, current calls get knock by incoming calls, you don't have enough time to take a breather or even get a glass of water in. It is very demanding very mentally exhausting job. The few Supervisors or Inchargers as they are call. that actually care about the Interpreters are fired.
You get no sick pay leave, no sick days, it is easier to win the lottery than to get an schedule change and unless so other willing coworker would swap days with you or would swap schedules with you are were royally screwed. The working conditions were subpar, call center hygiene was abysmal, and god forbid the AC should fail which happen often because you were suppose to work no matter what or get the risk fired. Sweatshop is exctaly what the company was, you had to work in Factory building with no AC, no windows, and no ventilation. One of my co workers actually had a heat stroke and the time she was granted by the doctor to be off was count as an occurence and she was fired a few months later.
Getting your well earn vacation days was subject to approval and you could never take time off for holidays, Gid forbid you were sick because unless you had vacation days to used for when you were sick, you could probably kiss you job goodbye if you miss more than a couple of days. Any time you were late, or miss a work day that counts as an occurrence more than six in a year and bye bye job, it doesn't matter it you send a medical certificate or not it still counts as you not being on the line.
Senior management has absolutely no idea what the job entails or what it feels like to be on the receiving end of the line. Clients were often rude, and had no idea what our job really entails, more often than not you could hear interpreters asking the clients to please slow down, or to limit the amount of information to interpret, and those are the clients that more often that not report you. LLS always side with the client and shows complete disregard of what they call VOI or Voice of the interpreter which were our complains as problems found with clients, service, lines and equipments.
There are many, many more issues but frankly it would take a book to go through all of them.
