WASHINGTON—Suppose you’re sick, but you’re also deaf, so you can’t talk with your doctor, without help? That’s where a translator steps in, using video relay services, a specialized form of communication which lets you talk to your doctor, and your doctor talk with you.
How about if you need access to your bank account, but the bank doesn’t have facilities online for the deaf? Once again, the translator steps in to help.
Or you’re a wife and mother with a deaf husband and a deaf 10-year-old daughter? Again, the trained translator, who works for one of two private call center contractors whom the Federal Communications Commission hired, steps in to help, especially in emergencies.
Yet the translators, who are trying to unionize with the Office and Professional Employees, are underpaid, overworked and burned out because their call centers are short-staffed.
There is insufficient privacy for the workers in the call centers, even as they deal with sensitive and personal information—such as bank balances and medical history—from their deaf and hard-of-hearing clients. There’s also poor-quality hardware, long wait times for service, insufficient training and “repetitive physical and mental injury” to the workers, a fact sheet says.
All that led the translators to turn to D.C. for public support—and from the agency, the FCC, that indirectly, through relaying user tax revenues, supports their mission.
The translators’ corporate bosses at ZP Better Together and at Sorenson cater to rapacious “private equity” investment firms which are only interested in call volume and company profits. ZP employs 1800 translators and 2500 more toil for Sorenson. Some 80%-90% of the translators work part-time, depending on seasonal trends.
So the group, including translators who also communicate in American Sign Language, staged a press conference outside the FCC offices in downtown D.C., declaring they want to make their—and their clients’—case to the agency’s commissioners, pushing the FCC to accede to the unionization drive, and to get ZP and Sorenson to meet with the workers and OPEIU.
The translators who spoke, or signed, declined to give their last names. The awful working conditions for the translators at the call centers, along with low pay and few benefits, are key issues for them and for OPEIU in its organizing drive.
“It’s about dignity, justice and ability to communicate” by the deaf and hard-of-hearing with people they interact with every day, explained Meg, a 10-year worker at Sorenson. “We face rising demand, stagnant wages and pressure. We might get a call from a bank, followed by a call from a mechanic, followed by a parent-teacher conference, followed by a 9-1-1 call,” all in rapid succession.
“We are the voice for deaf lawyers, small business owners and everyday regular people.
“But without a stable workplace, the quality of service” to the deaf and hard-of-hearing “is at risk,” Meg said. Unionizing can help bring that stability. “We’re asking the FCC to send a message” to the two big contractors “that the (human) interpreters are just as important as the equipment.”
“When a deaf individual is making a call, we are there,” said Felix, a part-time interpreter for the last five years. “High pace and high volume leads to stress, trauma and burnout.”
The interpreters drew support from Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, an union organizer and the new chair of the House Progressive Caucus, and Derek Braun, president of the American Association of University Professors/AFT local at nearby Gallaudet University, the nation’s higher education institution specifically dedicated, designed and staffed for people who are deaf or hard of hearing.
Casar’s trying to set up meetings between FCC commissioners with the interpreters and also with their deaf and hard-of-hearing clients. Casar strongly supported the workers and slammed the exploiters. “We cannot have a few private equity firms crushing these services” and forcing translators “to be working this hard and this long,” he said. “You as people” organizing with OPEIU “have a lot more power.”
“This service could be so much better if they had a union,” said Braun. In a follow-up interview, he also addressed the “elephant in the room,” the massive cuts in federal grants and sweeping firings of federal workers imposed by Republican President Donald Trump and his puppeteer, multibillionaire Elon Musk.
Just the same day the translators were speaking outside the FCC, Musk, leading off Trump’s first Cabinet meeting of the Republican president’s second term, termed all federal workers “worthless.”
And Gallaudet, Braun said, may be on the firing line, too. He explained 80% of the university’s annual $220 million budget comes through the federal Department of Education. Trump wants to kill that department, acceding to long-time right-wing demands. And millions of dollars of education grants have already been axed.
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