I'm happy to. There are a few different things.
Gatestone, as I mentioned, is a family of companies in the United States and Canada that is focused primarily on debt collection lines. They also have offices in the Philippines, Mexico and Belize. They've held many previous contracts for the Government of Canada that were, to my knowledge, all collection contracts. For years, PSAC has been constantly trying to express its concerns and have these workers unionized. On three separate attempts, the contracted companies fired union organizers when we were attempting to unionize them.
We spoke with a number of former employees of the company. Even the reviews of Gatestone on Yelp and the things they talk about are sad. There are no benefits, they're being underpaid and they're making $19 an hour. One thread of comments about Gatestone in particular was repeated in our interviews with people as well as online. One employee wrote, “you get paid so little for the stress that this company brings to you. They always look to cut corners and save as much money as possible even if it will make the life of their employees miserable. Again, they just don't care about your well being. Agents know that Gatestone is just a temporary job until you find something better.... I've never seen so many people leave a company after a short period of time.” We have several similar examples from employees.
It's costing the employer money. When they turned this call centre over through the contract, they had to hire, I believe, another 240 call centre agents and start from scratch. Some people had 10 years of knowledge and a lot of them left, and the folks who stayed around lost all the in-house knowledge. There are a lot of additional costs, and I think it's short-sighted on the part of the government.