I like this article. I worked in telemarketing for a while, and was probably one of the shittiest jobs I ever had. Not only did the companies not give a crap about the laws, they didn't care about their supposed customers. We sold worthless stuff trying to pursued them into using it over much better and more established companies. Example: AAA tow services.
I found myself trying to be the good guy in the situation and do my best to actually remove people from the call lists by marking them deceased and that.
But even still the companies would always somehow get those numbers back into circulation hoping that nobody would notice.
But this also proves something. From what you've written you knew you were doing something that was wrong. As one example:
"We sold worthless stuff trying to pursued (sic) them into using it over much better and more established companies"
But you had to earn a living so you did that. Now I don't know what your particular situation was or how badly you needed the job (proverbial relative dying of cancer or you would be homeless?) but it might be the same premise that the people running the business operate under. Everybody of course draws the line at a different point in terms of the "harm" they are willing to do. They feel that what they do is ok or possibly de-minimis but what someone else is doing on a larger scale (a guy who did what you did for 20 years or owned the business) is "bad".
I'm curious (and not being judgmental that you worked there as we all have different lines) why you kept that job when you saw what they were doing?
I was young and like stated, I needed a job and wasn't picky. Not to mention when I started I didn't know what exactly was going on, because I was part of another section that sold the Boston Globe newspaper before moving to the shady side.
I only worked there for 3 months, then I told my boss to go fuck herself and walked out.
Edit: and no offense taken, if you have any questions in regards to what little bit I do know about such a crappy industry let me know. I am somewhat knowledge in it.
Funny enough my current job is at a call center for a GPS company. I don't do any calling though.
It's pretty obvious - he needed to feed & cloth himself. For some, (perhaps you?) there must be some catastrophic event to create day to day money problems. For many people, especially the often young students or mothers who work these jobs, day to day money problems are just a fact of life. Should people plan better so they don't have to compromise and do things they disagree with? Of course, but that isn't everyone's reality.
edit: Or maybe he just wanted money for Spring Break...
I worked in a call center the summer in between high school and college, and the company I worked at was very cognizant of the various laws. This was before the federal no-call list was enacted, but I'm positive they strive for compliance with that as well. If people asked to be taken off the calling list, we had to flag their call as such and if we were caught not doing that, we'd get in trouble. Their were nuances to it though. You had to specifically ask to be taken off the list in order to be scrubbed entirely. If you said "no thank you" and hung up, you were getting called in 24-48 hours without a doubt. If you gave two "no's", you were scrubbed from the campaign, but not the global list.
It was still a terrible and shitty job, but it paid a few bucks better than minimum wage and the company was fairly lax on attendance (I was 17, so I had different priorities and a general lack of responsibility).
The worst day of my two or three months at that job was when I got put on a calling campaign for some mega-church. I felt terrible asking people who probably didn't have the money to donate to give up their money to this organization that was clearly raking in tens of millions a year and whose leader/minister/whatever was a multi-millionaire. Thankfully, I only had to do that one day and had so much motivation not to take in a single dollar, that I failed to land a single donation and was moved the next day to trying to get people to do balance transfers on their credit cards. Still annoying, but at least I didn't feel like I was robbing people by appealing to their faith and handing their money over to some evil creep.
My girlfriend dropped out of school and ended up at a call center cold calling Chamber of Commerce-listed companies/sole-proprietors selling energy (after being told she'd be calling people about hotel vouchers). She quit after three weeks. The script they were supposed to keep to had bogus lines about tax writeoffs you could get (which would be illegal) and most people weren't at all interested.
I found myself trying to be the good guy in the situation and do my best to actually remove people from the call lists by marking them deceased and that.
But even still the companies would always somehow get those numbers back into circulation hoping that nobody would notice.
Shady shit, glad I don't do that anymore.