Thursday - November 17, 2005

Help Desk Rage

Normally I sympathize with Help Desk people because I work in IT and I have to deal with BIG computer problems, like terabyte databases and tens of thousands of users, all day and sometimes all night and weekends. However, I’m posting this story for two reasons: (1) OldCatMan will love it, since he now knows there are others who feel the same way he does when he calls the Help Desk (and who probably use the same nasty words he does), and (2) I am thoroughly angry at Indians today since we have a contract-to-perm, new hire Indian DBA in my office who left work at noon yesterday with a sore throat (probably caused by an awful accent), leaving me to handle an after-hours task on his databases last night (12:00am to 3:00am working on tuning parameters and bouncing seven databases), only to come in this morning to find him complaining to our boss because I had not done the work precisely as he would have done. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr .... fair warning, Skipper is not in a good mood today. Especially if you talk to me with an accent ....

Outsourcing Outrage:
Indian Call-center Workers Suffer Abuse
NOIDA, India (SFGATE.COM)

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.”

- You can be reading of this story much more at this link

Posted by The Skipper     on 11/17/2005 at 01:32 PM   
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