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Telemarketing Crybabies
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One of the great advantages of the internet is that now anybody can become a publisher. One of the great disadvantages of the internet is that now anybody can become a publisher. At zdnet.com, there is a discussion on the U.S.'s national "don't call list" which allows people to register their phone number as one that is not to be called by telemarketers. The telemarketers claim that the U.S. Constitution gives them the right to call and bother people who do not want to be called and bothered. As stupid as that argument is, there is another argument equally stupid being pushed by their spokesmen which attempts to blame the victims of this harassment and paint them as cruel, uncaring oppressors of hard working people, and claims that the people who sign up for the list will be damaging the American economy. You can read one such argument by a poster at zdnet, "James Perley," at this link. Mr. Perley says he "just don't quite get why some people are having a problem with this." Below I will show that Mr. Perley is either deliberately trying to mislead people, or he is the one who doesn't get it due to his lack of understanding of basic economic principles. The moral shame of those who sign up First, Mr. Perley's assumption that you are responsible for the continued employment of supposedly millions of people you have never met, never want to meet, and never want to hear from in any way. If you sign up for the do not call list, you are deliberately throwing people out of work, and you should have that on your conscience. Spare us the morality lesson, Mr. Perley! I freely admit that because there is five dollars in my pocket, somebody today will starve to death because that five dollars is not in that person's pocket. But am I supposed to feel guilty about that? What are you doing about the many people who die of starvation today? Do you have money in your pocket? Do you have food in your kitchen? If so, then some people will die today because the money and food is under your control and not under theirs. Address your own cruelty--under your own standards--before you attempt to shove your hypocritical standards down others' throats. If you believe your stupid argument, then tomorrow when you wake up you be sure to remind yourself that somebody died because of your selfishness. Do I believe this? Whether I believe it or not is irrelevant. You are the one laying the guilt trip, not me. If you believe your argument, then it's enough to make me conclude that people dying of starvation is your fault and your responsibility, and you have made the choice to cause them to die. That you attempt to blame people who sign up for the do not call list for purposely throwing millions of people out of work is unconscionable, and you should be ashamed of yourself. The economic argument -- more unemployment Of course, along with Mr. Perley's argument that people who sign up for the do not call list bear a moral burden for putting people out of work, is the argument that this somehow hurts the economy. He has repeatedly stressed the supposedly huge strain on our unemployment insurance programs. When somebody suggested that they get another job, he says those people might not be retrainable, and he says that everybody who signs up for the list is responsible for having to pay more in taxes for unemployment. Let's do some basic economic theory here. Everything has a cost. Let's say that each of the people who have signed up for the list were annoyed to the tune of just one minute a day. As of this writing, over 48 million people had signed up. Assuming one minute of wasted time per person per day, then each day that is 800,000 man-hours that are wasted, where people were forced into spending time on something when they had preferred to spend it on something else. That's over 114,000 man-weeks wasted every day.. It's over 26,000 man-months wasted each day. It's over 2,000 man-years wasted every single day! Let's talk dollars. Suppose that the average wage of the people on the do not call list is only 10 dollars an hour. Any economist will tell you that such a person's leisure time is worth $10 per hour, because of the "opportunity cost." Such a person who chooses to do something besides work with his time pays for it by the income that he otherwise would get while working, but doesn't get because he chose to purchase some time not working. Now assuming that $10 per hour rate (which I have kept low for illustration purposes), the 800,000 man-hours that are wasted every day means that the cost of the wasted time spent answering unwanted calls is 8 million dollars--every day. For the year, that adds up to 2.9 BILLION dollars that is completely blown in our economy due to unwelcome and detested phone calls! Mr. Perley insists on addressing the economic argument, but he fails to even mention in passing the value of the time that people spend answering unwanted solicitation calls. My estimates (one minute per day per caller, $10 per hour wage for each person) are very low. The figure certainly is much higher. The only way that Mr. Perley and other crybabies can make their stupid economic argument is to distort the economics of the situation in the first place, and ignore the true cost of these invasions of privacy and leisure time. You can certainly understand why they don't talk about all the costs involved--they don't want you to know or think about them. Even Mr. Perley admits that there will be more callers signing up over the 48 million so far. As the number grows, though, this indicates that more and more people are fed up with their valuable time being taken up in unwelcome intrusions, and the math that applies here makes the waste worse, not better. Yet, according to Mr. Perley's arguments, your time is worth nothing. Your time is worth $0.00. Of course, you and I know your time is worth something to you. Know what? Mr. Perley knows it, too. His compassion is bogus--otherwise he would show some for the over 2,000 man years that are consumed every day bothering people who don't want to be bothered. He dumps on the people who want to regain the value of their time, by accusing them of not caring about others, when the fact is he has no concern whatsoever for the 48 million people who want to control their own private time. Now, about the risk of increasing unemployment taxes. What Mr. Perley fails to point out to you is that employers pay unemployment taxes. And they generally are apportioned among employers based on the employer's track record in hiring and releasing employees. Will your taxes go up? No. Whose taxes will go up? The telemarketing employers! Mr. Perley is trying to frighten people with a distortion of the unemployment insurance laws. Again, he deliberately misleads you. Let's for the moment assume that there are other costs involved similar to unemployment taxes. Mr. Perley points out that if telemarketing workers are laid off, we are going to have to pay for the convenience of the do not call list. This is another scare tactic. Our economy is already supporting their salaries in one way or another. But without the do not call list, there is that additional cost of having people spend so much time dealing with the unwelcome phone calls. Without the list, we have both the economic burden of the worker's salary, but also the economic burden of millions of people having to deal with the phone calls. Because the economy is already supporting the callers' salaries, if we pick up the full tab of those who become unemployed, what have we lost? We have not created an additional burden on the economy. While the workers could get some kind of public assistance, they would no longer get the salary, so that's a wash, despite Mr. Perley's scare tactics. What else would we have lost? We would have lost all the uncompensated time that people have to spend answering the calls. This certainly looks like a net gain for me. Mr. Perley is advocating a system of employment that depends on people spending time making other people waste their time! But remember--According to Mr. Perley, your time is worth nothing at all. Fake compassion, wrongful accusations If telemarketers lay off people after the do not call list becomes effective, according to Mr. Perley, that's your fault because you signed up for the list to regain the value of your time. Notice what I said. According to Mr. Perley, it's your fault. After you come home from work and you want to relax with your family, Mr. Perley thinks you really should be spending your time answering the phone and supporting somebody else's job, and if you don't you are a heartless monster! You are responsible for giving up your resources and time to keep people employed, and you are not to be compensated at all. This really reaches, because it lays the blame on the wrong people. Did you cause the employees to be hired in the first place? Are you going to type the lay-off notices and send them out? Are you going to meet the employees at the door one morning and say "you are fired"? Of course not. There is, however, one group of people who can prevent the loss of jobs that Mr. Perley complains about. They are the telemarketers. If they fire people, it will be their decision, not yours. This is an industry that is rife with non-compassion for its workers. They make very low wages, have few (if any) benefits, no job security, their jobs are already going overseas in droves to cheap labor markets, and many are losing their jobs to computerized dialing processes. Despite this horrible record, Mr. Perley and the industry want to blame you. Even without the do not call list, these people's jobs are already being lost. I have not seen Mr. Perley or anybody else in the industry state that they will retain workers if the do not call list is abandoned. Of course they wouldn't state that. They would continue going about their business as usual, laying off workers right and left, even if there were no do not call list. Conclusion Don't fall for the stupid arguments that Mr. Perley and others in the telemarketing industry make to scare you about the horrors of regaining your free time. Do not feel guilty about exercising your rights, despite the guilt trip they try to lay on you. You are not personally responsible for insuring continued employment of all the telemarketing workers in the country. If you have signed up for the list or are going to sign up for it, you live in the United States, and you have something that Mr. Perley doesn't want you to have: freedom. Enjoy it and be grateful that people like Mr. Perley are not in charge of the government so they can impose uncompensated extra burdens on you in their pursuit of a few bucks. Their compassion is fake, as it is clear they have absolutely no compassion for the millions of people who are fed up with having their time wasted without their consent. Bottom line To Mr. Perley and others who claim a moral right to pester people: The number of people who have registered for the do not call list indicate that Americans as a whole are fed up with you. In effect, we are saying, "We hate your guts, we don't want anything to do with you, and we are fighting back at your behavior." That's right. We are tired of you bothering us, taking our free time after a hard day at work, when we want to relax with our families and eat our dinner in peace. You got problems with that? Of course you do, you crybabies. But that's just too bad, because you brought this onto yourselves, and you'll have to deal with the consequences. Take your whining to somebody who gives a damn, and be satisfied that you were able to push us around with your bullying behavior as long as you were. Other stupid puppets of telemarketers See this Usenet post for yet another attempt to put a guilt trip on people who want to sign up for the list. |
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