Affordable Care Act Call Center Workers to Stage Mass Walkout on First Day of Open Enrollment for Health Insurance

Customer service representatives. Yan Krukov/Pexels

Call center workers for Affordable Care Act (ACA) health insurance coverage are planning to stage a mass walkout on the first day of the ACA’s open enrollment amid a dispute over pay, working conditions, and “abusive callers.”

Employees who work for Maximus federal call center, which has a contract with the federal government to provide customer support for Medicare and the ACA, will go on strike at facilities across the country on Nov. 1.

The company said in a petition that it is staging the walkout as part of its effort to fight for “safe working conditions, affordable health care, and an end to poverty wages.”

“Workers at two of Maximus’s 10 call centers have walked off the job in protest of poor working conditions, which is a big sacrifice, because many of us live paycheck to paycheck,” the petition states.

Specifically, workers are pushing for a $25 an hour starting wage, “time to breathe” between phone calls, and “meaningful protection from abusive callers,” according to a statement from Call Center Workers United, a union that represents 700,000 workers, including more than 65,000 customer service professionals, on Twitter.

The unions stated that Maximus can “easily afford $25 an hour,” noting that the company’s CEO, Bruce Caswell, “made almost $8 million in total compensation in 2021.” The union also noted that call center workers at the Internal Revenue Service and the Social Security Administration do “very similar work to us,” and “make an average of $55,000 a year.”

‘No Time to Breathe’

Call center workers claimed that they are expected to “pick up one call after another with almost no time to breathe,” which they said is “beyond stressful, if not impossible,” while urging Maximus bosses to grant them some time in between calls to relax and thus provide customers with the “best support possible.”

Finally, the union said that abusive callers affect workers’ mental health, something they said Maximus executives “just don’t get.”

Approximately 650 employees at facilities in Bogalusa, Louisiana; Hattiesburg, Mississippi; London, Kentucky; and Chester, Virginia, are set to take part in the mass walkout, at a time when “call volume drastically increases,” Fox News reports.

Maximus, based in Tysons, Virginia, was founded in 1975 and has 37,000 employees and an annual revenue of $4.25 billion, according to its official website.

A spokesperson told FOX Business that the company does not anticipate any disruption in services on Nov. 1.

In a statement to the Mississippi Free Press, Maximus said the company “respects the dignity and well being of our employees” and “welcomes the opportunity to work directly with our employees and discuss and hopefully resolve these concerns.”

“Over the past several years, Maximus has improved pay and compensation, reduced employees’ out-of-pocket health care expenses, and improved work processes and safety,” the statement said. “We continue to look for ways to assure that Maximus is an employer of choice.”

The company also added that it “provides reasonable and flexible break policies” and that employees “can request bathroom breaks at any time, and employees who work eight hours can take two 15-minutes rest breaks in addition to their half-hour lunch.”

The Epoch Times has contacted a spokesperson for Maximus for comment.