Interpreter Economics of Cartels and Price Fixing – Unionise or Unite?

In the last week, the previous blog post on Interpreter Price Wars sent a small flurry of comments into the inbox. A few days later someone posted a query on a Sign Language Interpreters e-group regarding price fixing. A few days after that an interesting post appeared from Street Leverage entitled: Should Sign Language Interpreters Unionize? Here follows a response:
Price fixing was an accusation many held about interpreters when the profession had years where supply and demand was in our favour. With only a few hundred interpreters in the market there was plenty of work to go around and those that were interpreting were the ones the Deaf community had decided were good enough.
Enter years of public interest in the profession, enter greater accessibility to basic BSL qualifications and a lack of understanding of the need for interpreter standards and registration, enter the creation of mainstream qualifications i.e. the dreaded NVQ.  It has served neither the interpreting profession nor Deaf people well. For every good NVQ Interpreting course, with additional teaching and high standards, there are two more who churn out candidates at lower standards for profit or even to supply an interpreting agency linked to the owners of the course.
Enter an economic crisis, enter government cuts, enter outsourcing and bring on a smidgen of the Fear i.e. will I be able to cover my mortgage this month and should I just accept that job for less fees? A handful of agencies in these market conditions jumped on a chance to dramatically cut prices of suppliers i.e. interpreters. In this way they were acting as a implicit cartel. We now have a market where the effects of an Oligopoly have been stimulated. How? Think of the market where there are a few big agencies holding numerous contracts in one local area. Or one large agency holding what is effectively a sole provider contract for a government contract, whether this is locally or nationally.
Illegal price fixing and anti-competitive behaviour is hard to prove though not impossible. The solution for many suppliers is to join a union. In the UK think farmer’s milk prices and Tesco. The National Farmers Union helped to make their story a success. Beware bad press: the Telegraph reported at the time of those horrible farmers increasing prices.
So how do Interpreters resolve the current issues in their market? Unionise or not? For many having a union is unpopular for the same points Antonio details in his post for Street Leverage.
He concludes that perhaps other methods are more suitable and uses the example of the Writers Guild of America who have organised strikes repeatedly throughout their history causing in 2007-08 chaos for American TV. Sign Language Interpreters in the UK could feasibly do this. The easier and perhaps less organised way is for interpreters to simply not drop their fees. But can we do this without a greater unity?
He points out that in the US they have RID and other organisations. Here in the UK we have three organisations for interpreters or those who may work as interpreters (moot point) plus a registration body. There used to be a one membership body and one for registration. It was easier then and we were more co-ordinated as a profession. It would be easier if this were the case now. In the field of spoken language interpreting, especially public service interpreting, there are just too many organisations. Try looking up ITI, CIoL, SPSI, PIA, NUPIT alongside the Say No to ALS and No to Peanuts campaigns. There has been some great work done in getting questions discussed in parliament. Ultimately this work would be a lot more powerful were there less confusion and more unity. Strength in numbers as it were.
Antonio raises other questions which can be tailored for the UK:
How can we talk about unionising to increase awareness and an understanding of market forces in our profession?
What workshops do we need to provide to empower interpreters to run themselves as businesses earning reasonable fees and enabling them to stay in the profession?
How do we reach the increasing number of interpreters who are not part of any organisation and do not understand the effects their actions may have on the wider profession?
What other gaps in the profession are there that we need to consider and resolve?
If you have the answers or would like to respond please leave a comment below. There will be much more to say on this topic…

One Stop Shopping

Outsourcing or One Stop Shops. Words that strike fear into the heart of the Sign Language Interpreter. A word that means the work that they previously did direct or though one agency for a council, a hospital or a court now has to go through a larger spoken language agency.
This seems nonsensical to the jobbing interpreter, but ultimately makes sense to the statutory organisation. The logic or process goes like this: we use many interpreters for many different languages. British Sign Language (BSL) is a language. Our staff do not know how to book interpreters so we will employ an organisation who can do this for us. We will save money by employing an agency to cover our interpretation and translation needs (which will include those difficult to source sign language interpreters)…
We will go through a lengthy procurement process where agencies will try to outbid each other to win a contract at a unit price that is ultimately unsustainable. Organisation will expect said agencies to put something in their tender about quality but really it is tokenism for we will only be awarding a contract on the basis of costs. We will award contract to cheapest provider regardless…
Spoken language agency will not understand how to source a BSL interpreter and will sub-contract a specialist agency. They will think they can pay BSL interpreter the same as a spoken language interpreter and when they start the contract will get a big shock. Specialist BSL agency eventually agrees to reduced price sub-contract as all previous work they did is now being outsourced to spoken language agencies who have little understanding of deaf people and BSL interpreters. Specialist BSL agency still wants to survive in market where they get less work. BSL agency asks BSL interpreter to work for less fees. BSL interpreter, if accepting fees, finds they are working for a lot less than before. BSL interpreter is then providing profit for two separate contracts. BSL interpreter considers leaving the profession as they can not survive as an interpreter and must consider another career. Deaf people get less experienced and maybe unregistered interpreters as a result.
Time for a real life example… One of the biggest culprits is Language Empire and Remark Interpreting. Language Empire has a contract to provide interpreting for ATOS. ATOS has the contract for the Government’s Department of Work and Pensions medical assessments. ATOS carry out assessments to decide if the claimant should be allowed incapacity benefit or if they are fit to work. There are problems for disabled people in general with these assessments. MPs themselves have stated the assessments are flawed. The ATOS machine rumbles on… so who do they employ to do the interpreting? Language Empire. An agency who is so ignorant of BSL it calls it British Special Language. The images of hands on its ‘BSL’ page are not of any recognisable signs and they state they have ‘special disability interpreters’. Nobody actually knows what this means. Their webpage has caused BSL interpreters much mirth but complete dismay at their ignorance.
The worst is yet to come. A deaf-led agency has now started to sub-contract for Language Empire. At least the RNID (now Action on Hearing Loss) when sub-contracting for The Big Word stood up for BSL interpreters and helped The Big Word understand the BSL interpreting profession. This organisation has done nothing for interpreters or the deaf community it proposes to serve. They continue to try to source BSL interpreters at greatly reduced cost for what it’s contractors call British Special Language. This particular agency states one of their aims as supporting and enhancing the lives of Deaf, hard of hearing and blind individuals.’ I don’t think so.
Meanwhile we hear of regular reports of yet another council, organisation or government department outsourcing or looking for a ‘one stop shop’. When the agency is not reputable, the cost to the organisation generally remains the same but the quality drops off. With BSL usually representing something around 2% of a contract, the interpreter or deaf person loses out. What used to cost an organisation £100 – £160 per booking average direct, now costs the same or worse (Freedom of Information requests by interpreters show this to be the case due to sub-contracting).
The fact costs have barely been saved is not important. It’s the ramifications to the profession and subsequently deaf people that matters. Spoken language agencies generally do not understand the NRCPD registration system for sign language interpreters. These agencies are more likely to employ someone with level 1 or 2 in sign language (equivalent to a GCSE or A Level in French) thinking this is acceptable. It may be if we were native BSL users but as interpreters, by the nature of the job, we are mostly people that can hear, and we tend to have English as our first language. Therefore, most people with a basic qualification in BSL do not have enough fluency to interpret anything but someone buying a cup of coffee much less a medical appointment. Would you try to interpret consent for an operation to a French man if you had GCSE French?
Every qualified registered interpreter has been to an appointment where the deaf person said but that’s not what the interpreter said last week. Take the case recently of an elderly deaf man who thought he was having a minor operation on his shoulder. The hospital had provided an ‘interpreter’ the week before to sign the consent forms. When the registered interpreter arrived a week later the patient was shocked to discover he would be having a a major operation that day under general anaesthetic. What will it take to stop this… A malpractice lawsuit? A death? Rumour has it that already happened but unless someone actually does anything about it, the government outsourcing machine continues, the big agencies profit and deaf people lose out.