By: Paul Weinberg

  Does the breathless excitement that greeted the merger of U.S. media giant Time Warner and Internet service provider (isp) America Online make you hungry for one of those hot jobs on the web?If the digital workplace seems too glamorous to resist, consider the testimony of "S", a former technical support worker with the Toronto-based ips Interlog, which in 1998 was itself gobbled up by the larger, U.S.-based ips PSINet.
  "S" says he was attracted to Internet work by innovations like the offer of "stock options". A stock option is a payment to employees in the form of shares in the company, rather than cash. It is a huge carrot for high-tech employees, because of the widespread stories in the business about secretaries and support workers with stock options becoming millionaires after their companies struck gold.
 

The crazy pace of work life, which more and more scientific evidence shows has negative medical effects, is central to the operation of Internet start-up companies

  But "S" did not win the stock option lottery. Instead, holding stock options merely persuaded him to put up with low pay and long hours. He started off at about $19,000, which got raised to $27,000. He sometimes worked 16 hours a day in "hairy" situations helping to maintain network operations and snuff out glitches and breakdowns. "The deal at Interlog was that it was more of a learning experience," he says.
  S's story is not unusual. The crazy pace of work life, which more and more scientific evidence is demonstrating can have serious medical side effects, is central to the operation of new Internet start-up companies, which began in California's Silicon Valley and are now popping up across North America and are being propelled by venture capitalists.
  According to Bill Lessard, co-author of Net Slaves: True Tales of Working the Web, published by McGraw Hill, most people who dream of getting rich through an Internet start-up do not realize that nine out of ten of these companies fail.
  Companies that are engaged in round-the-clock software development naturally seek younger employees with the drive, energy, lack of family commitments and most importantly, "foolishness," says the New York-based Lessard, and a former temp worker for Prodigy, the precursor to America Online.
  Lessard cites one Internet start-up where the meals are catered three times a day and bunk beds are stationed beside the cubicles, so the employees do not have to leave their building. Inside, it's like barging into a messy university student residence with pizza boxes strewn on the floor. "You are working for some 23 or 24 year old a lot of the time, at least in the early stages, who doesn't know anything about time management," says Lessard.
 

Home shoppers can easily miss the scene of stress and strain that unfolds at a growing number of online retailing operations

  On the outside, the home shoppers who - with a quick flick of a button and browser - make a purchase on their PC, can easily miss the stresses and strain that go on behind the scenes in the growing number of online retailers, recently inundated with orders during the Christmas rush.Those unable to operate "on Internet speed" and respond to problems on the fly need not apply at Chapters Online, for instance, says its director of human resources, Andy Labute.
  The grand daddy of all the online retailers and prototype model for electronic commerce, Amazon.com was accused last November in the Washington Post of tolerating sweat shop working conditions for its customer service representatives. The way it has responded to an overload of email messages has been to forbid reps from handling less than 7.5 emails an hour if they want to keep their jobs. They are actively discouraged from spending any significant time on the telephone with customers dealing with the status of a particular order.
  All this sounds very familiar to Victor Morden, national representative and organizer for the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada (CEP). While the majority of calls that he receives come from unhappy call centre workers in the cable and telecommunications industries, he observes those productivity measurements are probably higher in the Internet sector. "The more technology there is, the more statistics there are for the employer to look at."
  Already in the call centres that Morden has investigated, customer service reps are electronically measured for the length of stay on the telephone and how much time they spend going through their email and voice mail. But at the same time, they also are generally expected to sell on the telephone, which means their conversations cannot be too brief either. That leaves them quite vulnerable. "The group leader can call you in and say you are not meeting the objective. They always pick on the senior people who are earning higher wages and have more benefits," he says.
  So what do the recent spate of mergers mean for employment in the brave new world of high tech? Will there be more opportunities and creative challenges? Or just more stress and strain?
  According to employees, after Interlog was bought by PSINet, the most direct effect was that employees were called down to a Toronto hotel and divided into two groups - where the larger one was summarily fired.
  For Ottawa-based PSINet executive Kathy Adams, the sackings were a regretable move designed "to improve customer service". Yet for employees they were proof that the wire-head businesses can be every bit as ruthless as their industrial-age counterparts.

Paul Weinberg is a Toronto journalist specializing in information technology issues.

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