When our Internet connection stopped working last week, my wife called customer care of our local service provider in the East Bay Area of Oakland. The company sent over a technician within an hour of the complaint and he fixed our problem. However, over the weekend, we saw that our Internet connection was not working again. Our next call to the company was routed through to a call centre in India and after that, our morning began to go downhill pretty fast. The person on the other side had a general idea of where we were calling from, though her responses were programmed and chillingly reflexive. She could have been part of a late 19th century physiological experiment, where subjects were conditioned to provide reflexes to certain stimuli. Only, in her case, she provided apologies, useless drivel and annoying “on hold” music that stretched on for close to twenty minutes.
There have been legendary commentaries, some of it outright racist, about consumers in the west having to deal with customer care providers who are based in South Asia. While some commentators highlight the caricaturised nature of the encounter, others seek to see it as the symbolic economic ascendance of once developing countries like India. The essence of this encounter is something called Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), which has become synonymous with Indian cities like Bangalore, in contemporary public culture. It involves the breaking down of a production process into neat, clearly defined lines. These lines are based both on competencies and activities that are almost like the front and back of a hotel. The front involves face-to-face interaction with customers, while the back is where a range of activities ranging from laundry, cooking and cleaning are organised.
In the real world, this involves taking certain kinds of work offshore to countries like India, because big companies find it easier to cut down their expenses in the countries where they work. While this creates adverse local conditions, many companies like to fob off criticism by stating that they have created huge employment benefits in other countries. This is not true. In countries like India, they employ less than 1% of the population and do not create any forward and backward linkages in the economy. These companies could well shift to some other country where there is a favourable climate. This is the crux of the problem with outsourcing production. It is fundamentally unfriendly to labour rights and preys on legal regimes that allow corporations to dodge their social responsibility. It is a classic case of reducing the production process to mutually autonomous and disengaged lines of work, where the workers are absolutely divorced from the product of their labour. It is no coincidence that those who work in BPO units in India do not have rights to organise.
This may not be the popular perception of the BPO industry and outsourcing process in our region, since some of our youth have found gainful employment in call centres across India. Yet, one has to step up to ask several questions about the kind of relations that outsourcing fosters among our peoples: Does it lead to any form of empowerment for local communities? Does it encourage equality and value of labour? Does it make our societies more questioning and enlightened? Does it challenge political marginalisation? I am afraid that all the answers to these questions will be “no”. This phenomenon only represents the rapaciousness of capitalist globalisation and in no way should it be encouraged at the expense of the material and political empowerment of local communities, be these communities situated in Oakland or Dimapur.
Sanjay (Xonzoi) Barbora
xonzoi.barbora@gmail.com
There have been legendary commentaries, some of it outright racist, about consumers in the west having to deal with customer care providers who are based in South Asia. While some commentators highlight the caricaturised nature of the encounter, others seek to see it as the symbolic economic ascendance of once developing countries like India. The essence of this encounter is something called Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), which has become synonymous with Indian cities like Bangalore, in contemporary public culture. It involves the breaking down of a production process into neat, clearly defined lines. These lines are based both on competencies and activities that are almost like the front and back of a hotel. The front involves face-to-face interaction with customers, while the back is where a range of activities ranging from laundry, cooking and cleaning are organised.
In the real world, this involves taking certain kinds of work offshore to countries like India, because big companies find it easier to cut down their expenses in the countries where they work. While this creates adverse local conditions, many companies like to fob off criticism by stating that they have created huge employment benefits in other countries. This is not true. In countries like India, they employ less than 1% of the population and do not create any forward and backward linkages in the economy. These companies could well shift to some other country where there is a favourable climate. This is the crux of the problem with outsourcing production. It is fundamentally unfriendly to labour rights and preys on legal regimes that allow corporations to dodge their social responsibility. It is a classic case of reducing the production process to mutually autonomous and disengaged lines of work, where the workers are absolutely divorced from the product of their labour. It is no coincidence that those who work in BPO units in India do not have rights to organise.
This may not be the popular perception of the BPO industry and outsourcing process in our region, since some of our youth have found gainful employment in call centres across India. Yet, one has to step up to ask several questions about the kind of relations that outsourcing fosters among our peoples: Does it lead to any form of empowerment for local communities? Does it encourage equality and value of labour? Does it make our societies more questioning and enlightened? Does it challenge political marginalisation? I am afraid that all the answers to these questions will be “no”. This phenomenon only represents the rapaciousness of capitalist globalisation and in no way should it be encouraged at the expense of the material and political empowerment of local communities, be these communities situated in Oakland or Dimapur.
Sanjay (Xonzoi) Barbora
xonzoi.barbora@gmail.com
