Newsletter No. 27
APRIL / MAY 2005
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Indian call-centre workers seek ‘international standards’ Indian call centre and other IT workers are cheap, educated and speak English, so many world corporations — General Electric, American Express, British Airways - are locating back offices there. India’s IT industry — call centres, software development, programming - has grown from 1.3 to 3 per cent of GDP since 1994. The ‘knowledge’ revolution is spreading to other science based industry sectors like biotechnology and pharmaceuticals. India’s call centre workers — drawn from the educated middle classes — not only work for less than a tenth of the wage of their western equivalent, but work long, non-standard hours. British trade union Amicus found that ‘compounding the intensity of repetitive task performance’ of Indian call centre workers is the ‘significant fact that call handling takes place at night, or late in the evenings, on shifts that last 8-10 hours and in some cases, 6 days a week’. The mix of intensive call handling and shift working means ‘exhaustion, withdrawal and burnout are common’ (Call Centres in Scotland and Outsourced Competition from India Amicus 18.12.03). A Young Professionals Collective is helping call centre workers deal with job stress, high attrition rates and ailments such as ‘insomnia, depression and digestive system disorders’, ‘by talking to experts and sharing concerns with peers’. YPC is not a union, but union activists are setting it up. YPC organiser and labour lawyer Vinod Shetty says it’s a welfare organization, ‘not an attempt to unionise the burgeoning call centre industry’; but its aim is standard working conditions in all Indian call centres ‘at par with international practices.’ ‘If we can not offer international salaries, let us at least provide international working conditions’ says Shetty (www.keralanext.com/news/ 24.1.05). India may be the world’s third largest economy by 2050 based on growth in sectors like the IT industry, but already cost pressures are building in India. The Philippines, China, Vietnam and Brazil should all benefit from the growth of the call centre industry, fuelled by cost considerations in developed countries’ (‘Philippines may surpass India in call centres’ Sydney Morning Herald 18.2.05). YPC is not a trade union, but its members will soon realise the only guarantee of their welfare is when they do organize, using their collective strength to gain meaningful concessions from their employers. These concessions will necessarily concern length and intensity of work hours in relation to remuneration. As India’s IT industry matures the prospects of promotion and the chance to quit and seek other, better paying work will diminish. But for now, India’s IT workers have the chance to trail blaze world standard conditions in their own industry and to extend them into other growth sectors of the Indian economy. To do this, they must consciously organise themselves as a new element of India’s working class. In so doing they can call on and inspire fellow IT workers through-out the world (for solidarity contact YPC: ypcollective@yahoo.com). |