The San Francisco Gate is running an article from the perspective of
Indian call-center employees, who are consistently insulted and
attacked by Americans angry over out-sourcing. 22 year old SBC
employee Saurabh Jha, says a woman phoned from Texas recently and
told him that, thanks to outsourcing, "You are getting money, food,
shelter. You should be starving."Noida, India -- While irate calls
are a mainstay of customer service work in any country, many Indian
call-center workers say they regularly face particular abuse from
Americans, whose tantrums are sometimes racist and often inspired by
anger over outsourcing.
This vitriol has fueled a "searing anger" among the Indian
employees, says Vinod Shetty, a Bombay lawyer who has formed a
collective for call-center workers. "A lot of trauma is caused."
Debalina Das, 22, a computer help-line agent in the city of
Hyderabad in south India, punched the button last winter for a call
from the United States.
The caller greeted her with a torrent of racial and sexual slurs,
accused her of "roaming about naked without food and clothes" and
asked, "What do you know about computers?"
The diatribe ended with the comment:"This company is just saving
money by outsourcing to Third World countries like yours."
Such telephone tirades are fueled by outrage over outsourcing, which
is expected to move 3.4 million U.S. service-sector jobs overseas by
2015, according to the consultancy Forrester. Most of the work comes
to India, where young, low-cost employees now handle a range of
American tasks -- they draw cartoons, interpret heart scans,
adjudicate insurance claims, reserve flights and chase debtors.
Das, who quit the job after four months, said she learned to dislike
Americans. "Rarely, there are people who are good," she said by e-
mail, "but then others remind me that all they believe in is
cursing, and they don't have respect for others."
Her opinion is not uncommon among many workers in India's burgeoning
call-center industry.
Relations between India and the United States have grown closer in
recent years. India now sends more students to American colleges
than any other country.
Indians form the wealthiest and one of the fastest-growing immigrant
groups in the United States. And in the last decade, American
companies have increasingly sought Indian customers and employees.
Not everyone is happy about the growing ties between the two
nations. An anti-outsourcing movement has drawn wide support as
layoffs continue to mount at such U.S. companies as IBM, which is
cutting 13,000 jobs in Europe and the United States and adding
14,000 in India, according to the Washington Alliance of Technology
Workers.
In the first three months of this year, state legislators proposed
112 bills to stanch the exodus of American jobs, according to the
National Foundation for American Policy.
Some opponents of outsourcing, often fired workers themselves, have
rechanneled their rage at job-slashing CEOs toward India. On the Web
forum Is Your Job Going Offshore?
(isyourjobgoingoffshore.com/forums/) contributors variously describe
India as depraved, as a haven for terrorists, a "giant leech" and a
nation of "back-stabbing cowards."
It is this kind of commentary that has shaped a perception among
India's customer-care workers that Americans are
intolerant. "Everybody thinks like that," said Samik Chowdhury,
assistant manager at an IBM office in northern India. "Every time,
it's racism only."
This attitude is not typical of most urban Indians, who tend to
admire the United States for its strength and entrepreneurial
spirit. In a recent 16-country Pew poll, India had the highest
percentage of citizens with a favorable opinion of the United
States, 71 percent.
The less favorable view, though, is beginning to seep into Indian
popular culture. The scripts for a new sitcom called "The Call
Center," scheduled to air this winter on the leading channel NDTV,
depict Westerners as arrogant, immoral and comically rude.
The show's villain, the Indian manager of a call center, is an India-
bashing blowhard, a disposition he picked up at an Ivy League
business school in the United States.
One of the episodes recreates a real-life exchange that occurred in
January between an American and an Indian agent that has become
notorious among the call center crowd here. On the Philadelphia
radio show "Star and Buc Wild," host Troi Terrain phoned an Indian
call center pretending to order hair beads for his daughter. The
call quickly turned vicious.
"Listen to me, you dirty rat eater," Terrain growled, to muffled
laughter in the studio. "I'll come out there and choke the -- out of
you. You're a filthy rat eater. I'm calling about my American 6-year-
old white girl. How dare you outsource my call?"
Indian offices have taken measures to thwart such attacks: Agents
typically adopt anglicized names, undergo "accent neutralization"
and U.S. cultural training, and sometimes claim to be located in the
United States. They are taught to suffer attacks politely and try to
calm customers. Failing that, many offices now offer callers the
option to be transferred to agents in the United States.
These humiliations, say observers, are tolerated by a labor force
that savors the opportunity to join India's growing middle class.
With monthly incomes of about $200, call-center employees live well
in a country where many are poverty-stricken.
"They feel like it is their duty" to swallow insults, says labor
researcher Babu Remesh.
Sumit Bhasin, a 25-year-old call-center worker for HCL BPO
Technologies in the northern Indian city of Noida, says American
customers tend to have an "egoistic, bossy kind of attitude." When
he was young, he said, he used to dream of traveling to the United
States, as many Indians do, but after working in call centers for
several years, he is not so sure anymore.
However, he loves his job, because he makes $440 a month and gets to
learn about high technology like routers, modems and concepts of
networking.
But for others, the abuse is taking its toll.
A group of SBC call-center workers, also in Noida, sat recently on
the clipped grass in front of the silver-glassed office building
where they field Americans' Web connection problems. Callers often
dismiss them the moment they detect their Indian accents, they say.
"A whole lot of the time, people are yelling," says Kapil Chawla,
23. "They just want to talk to an American."
Saurabh Jha, a 22-year-old in blue jeans, says a woman phoned from
Texas recently and told him that, thanks to outsourcing, "You are
getting money, food, shelter. You should be starving."
She berated him for 12 minutes before she finally allowed him to
offer advice that promptly fixed her problem: to unplug her computer
and plug it back in.
"I was speechless," he says. "She didn't even give me a chance."
