[...] the issue of pay was ‘seen as being unwinnable’. This was partly due to the charity fundraising that the call centre was engaged in. As mentioned earlier, the managers would apply a kind of ‘moralism’ to workers: soldiering at work would only hurt the charity, a pay rise would mean less money for the charities, and so on. The ‘moralism’ that surrounds charities can be deployed by management in an attempt to encourage workers or deflect their grievances. This is despite the fact that charity call centres, in general, are not charities themselves. Instead they are a sector of outsourced call-centre operations which compete for contracts to raise money on behalf of charities. The call centre is therefore itself a profit-making venture. Michael and the other workers started an investigation, looking through the company’s accounts to prove that a pay rise could come from the profits rather than the funds raised for the charities.