By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News
Hiawatha, Iowa, USA
Published September 4, 2026

A Job Title Designed to Depress Wages

The term “customer service” is not descriptive. It is strategic.

At GoDaddy, workers routinely perform technical labor—diagnosing DNS failures, troubleshooting hosting stacks, resolving SSL issues, and untangling email delivery problems—while being classified under a job title associated with low-wage call centers.

This is not semantic drift. It is wage architecture.

By labeling technical support as “customer service,” the company benchmarks pay against the lowest-paying category possible while extracting higher-value labor. The title does the work that payroll will not.

Technical Labor Without Technical Pay

The tasks are not ambiguous. They require system literacy, procedural reasoning, and error isolation under time pressure. These are not conversational skills. They are technical competencies.

Yet compensation remains anchored to the idea that the worker is primarily calming customers rather than resolving infrastructure failures. The result is predictable: skilled labor, flattened into an entry-level pay band.

This is how companies suppress wages without violating any single rule. The work is real. The title is fiction.

Metrics That Ignore the Work

Performance is measured not by problems solved, but by calls closed, scripts followed, and time reduced. Complexity is treated as inefficiency. Accuracy is secondary to throughput.

When technical problems take time—as they inevitably do—workers are penalized for the very labor they were hired to perform. The system rewards speed over correctness and politeness over resolution.

Under these conditions, the job title becomes a disciplinary tool. If the role is “customer service,” then depth is unnecessary and hesitation is failure.

Management Without Accountability

Supervisors are often empowered to motivate but not to compensate. Verbal assurances of advancement, raises, or reclassification are offered freely. When workers attempt to formalize those promises, the response is procedural: Do you have it in writing?

This structure is intentional. Authority is diffused downward. Responsibility is retained upward. Workers are encouraged to trust managers who lack the power to deliver.

Hope replaces contracts. Documentation replaces intent.

Why This Structure Persists

Calling technical labor “customer service” solves multiple problems at once. It keeps wages low. It simplifies hiring. It blunts legal exposure. It normalizes turnover.

Most importantly, it externalizes frustration. When customers are unhappy, it is framed as a service issue. When workers are underpaid, it is framed as an entry-level reality.

The system does not misclassify by accident. It misclassifies because it works.

The Cost of the Lie

The long-term cost is not just worker burnout, though burnout is guaranteed. The deeper cost is institutional degradation. When technical labor is undervalued, systems decay. Knowledge leaves. Errors repeat.

Customers experience this as incompetence. Workers experience it as disposability. Management experiences it as acceptable churn.

Calling this “customer service” is not a misunderstanding.
It is the mechanism.

For more social commentary, please see Occupy 2.5 at https://Occupy25.com

References (APA)

Braverman, H. (1974). Labor and monopoly capital: The degradation of work in the twentieth century. Monthly Review Press.

Graeber, D. (2018). Bullshit jobs: A theory. Simon & Schuster.

Kalleberg, A. L. (2011). Good jobs, bad jobs. Russell Sage Foundation.

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