| |
| |
|
| Cyber
Coolies |
By
Harish Trivedi |
| Call center workers
are the new slave laborers of the 21st century. |
|
|
|
"Hi,
I am Peter. How may I help you?" "Hi,
I am Jane. Nice and warm today in Atlanta!
And what can I do for you?"
Except that, as we all know now, he's not
Peter and she's not Jane, and what they
can do for anyone is strictly limited to
what can be done over the phone or through
a computer. Nor do they really live down
the road or in the vicinity to be breathing
the same nice and warm air; they are probably
as far away from the American caller as
it is possible to be on our little planet.
Sitting in a little cubicle in Bangalore
or Gurgaon, they have just read the Atlanta
weather off the computer screen.
These brisk and bright young Indians are
employees of various call-centers and business
processing offices set up in India to cater
to American and British multinationals.
Many of them work through the night, on
what is called the chowkidar (night guard)
shift, for the good reason that night in
India is day for their clients in America.
They speak in an accent that is not quite
American, but resolutely not Indian either;
it has, over a long and rigorous training
programme, been "neutralized."
A lot else in their personality, biological
clock, and identity has been neutralized
as well.
|
So, why do these eager
young souls have to pretend to be Americans,
to be anyone but themselves?
Why are they obliged to lie through their
teeth each time they open their mouths?
If, in that cynical saying, each man (or
woman) has his/her price, what is theirs?
Do they get paid half or one-fourth or
even one-eighth of what an American worker
would get for doing their job? No, it
is probably more like one-tenth. So, why
do they do it? |
|
There is,
as always, another side to it. However little
they are paid, these people would probably
be paid nothing at all if they did not have
these jobs. They are the scions of middle-class
parents who have paid good money to put
them through English-medium schools, and
they have come out with no skill other than
a certain fluency in English (which paradoxically
must be reconstituted as soon as they enter
a call-center) and a wide-eyed exposure
to Western popular culture.
Indeed, so glamoured are many of them by
the prospect of working for a multinational,
and so beguiled by what they imagine to
be the American life-style swirling around
their work-place, that they feel that they
are already half-way to America.
Except that, for most of them, the enchantment
wears off sooner than later. Many find that
they have no social life left to speak of,
as they are at work when their friends and
family are at home. Some develop long-term
sleep disorders, and some take so much verbal
abuse, day after day, from irate American
customers that they actually need psychological
help, which some call-centers themselves
have learnt to provide.
|
|
|
|
| |
| The burn-out is high, the
turnover is rapid, and the scars of schizophrenia
run deep. After all, for just how long can
Pratap play at being Peter and Jaya at being
Jane? In any case, it is not a proper job,
there are no long-term career prospects,
and when one moves on, it's not the kind
of work-experience one would care to flaunt
on one's resume.
In many ways, this kind of job marks a
new and advanced stage of the ever thorny
relationship between capital and labor.
|
|
Some people
have always left home in search of better
economic prospects, and many more have been
forced to leave. The massive slave trade from
Africa to the plantations of America was probably
the most brutal example of such coercive human
movement. When slavery was finally abolished
by the British parliament in 1833, it was
almost immediately replaced, at least within
the British Empire, by what Hugh Tinker, a
British academic, has called (in the title
of his book on the subject) A New System of
Slavery.
This was the arrangement by which cheap labor
from India was dragooned to work on the sugar
plantations of colonies as widely distant
from India and from each other as Fiji, Mauritius
and the West Indies. Mansfield Park by Jane
Austen alludes darkly to these slave-run plantations,
while the early fiction of V. S. Naipaul,
himself the descendant of Indian laborers
transported half-way across the world to the
West Indies, is a testimony to the enforced
Indian migration.
Another great wave of human dislocation under
economic compulsion occurred shortly after
World War II and the coming of Indian independence,
when cheap labor from India and Pakistan (as
well as from the West Indies) migrated to
the United Kingdom.
|
|
|
|
| |
These immigrants took up
low menial jobs, which the British themselves
did not want; some of them are still seen
sweeping the floor and cleaning the toilets
at Heathrow. But no economic phenomenon
is ever merely economic; it often has
unforeseen human consequences.
As a bye-product of that migration, the
"fair" face of England has been
altered forever after and so has its cultural
and culinary identity. Perhaps as a lesson
learnt from letting strange people come
in, cyber outsourcing lets the jobs go
out, instead. Other people can now stay
just where they are and still be of use
to the global economy.
We seem to have advanced from forcible
economic migration to voluntary economic
migration to the migration now not of
labor but instead of capital. But is this
really progress and improvement, or is
this, on the other hand, the ugliest and
the most uncaring face of capitalism seen
so far? |
|
If outsourcing has become a big issue in
the West, it is because jobs are being lost
on a significant scale. The much celebrated
process of globalization is finally seen
not only to degrade and demean the globalized,
but to begin to hurt the globalizers as
well. Thus, there are now at least three
distinct perspectives available on the phenomenon:
the Indian, the British and the American.
A characteristic British response to outsourcing
is to be found in an article by George Monbiot
titled "The flight to India: The jobs
Britain stole from the Asian subcontinent
200 years ago are now being returned"
(The Guardian, 21 October 2003). Trust the
British to resort to a well-honed sense
of historical irony when faced with a present
crisis!
Monbiot boldly and pithily calls the colonial
spade a postcolonial shovel: "Britain's
industrialization was secured by destroying
the manufacturing capacity of India,"
and "We are rich because the Indians
are poor. " He also acknowledges what
many euphoric young Indians cannot: "The
most marketable skill in India today is
the ability to abandon your identity and
slip into someone else's." But surely,
he goes over the top when he suggests that
outsourcing is now doing to Britain what
the East India Company did to India. For
that, we Indians will have to go and rule
over Britain for 200 years - in that miserable
climate!
|
|
|
|
As
for the American response, it is bewilderingly
varied. Susan Sontag, writer and public
intellectual, published a long article
titled "The world as India"
in the Times Literary Supplement (London,
13 June 2003), in which she seemed to
celebrate a brave new world where the
young all over the globe would live the
American dream and speak in fake American
accents, as they already do in the call-centers
of India.
In a debate in that paper which followed,
I called these harbingers of a new age
"cyber-coolies," which in turn
brought a retort from another Indian,
himself associated with the running of
several call-centers, that these young
persons were instead "masters of
the universe."
More recently, the American outlook on
the issue has grown distinctly less upbeat
and more anxious. |
| The grand old man of American
economists, the Nobel-winner Paul A. Samuelson,
retired professor at M.I. T. whose college
text-book, first published in 1948 and
now in its 18th edition, has probably
been the best selling introduction to
the subject ever, was reported in The
New York Times (9 Sept 2004) as having
challenged the smug orthodoxy on outsourcing,
which is "the popular polemical untruth"
that globalization and free trade are
good for everyone all the time. |
|
| If Americans
thought that they will not lose more and
more jobs in the future and be paid lower
average wages, then, says Samuelson, they
"must believe in the tooth fairy."
And during a one-hour Indo-American
debate on outsourcing on the CNN broadcast
live on 9 September 2004, even the word
"ethical" came up a couple of
times, prompting one participant (all
right, it was only me!) to cite a highly
ethical-sounding cartoon from The New
Yorker (30 Aug 2004).
It shows two angels in heaven opening
and examining a freshly delivered consignment
of angels' wings, as one angel says to
the other: "We design them here,
but the labor is cheaper in Hell."
And that, for some of us, just about sums
it up. |
|
| |
|
..- End
Of Article..... |
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
