Sunday - July 11, 2004
Oui, Oui, Mon-sewer
In France, the workweek is only 30-35 hours long and Frenchmen take off over the entire country for summer holiday. The whole country shuts down while they all take their annual bath. So why should France complain about outsourcing jobs? They can't. But can you guess where French jobs are being outsourced to? The only other place would have to be a country as civilized and efficient as the French, n'est ce pas?
Outsourcing Comes To Africa, Bringing Jobs And Fake Parisian Accents
From The Canadian Press
On the job, she's Dominique Mercier - nattering in lilting French, working her headset eight hours a day, and hawking telephone services to Europeans.
Come day's end, the accent drops, and Dominique's true identity stands revealed: Fatou Ndiaye, 32-year-old Senegalese college graduate, and one of thousands of operators dialing up the West from booming call centres in West Africa.
"When I applied for this job, I did not know what it was, or what to expect," says Ndiaye, now a supervisor watching over a dozen operators wearing Islamic head scarves, West African robes or Western clothes.
The women chatter away in the finest - faked - Parisian accents to consumers in France, 5,900 kilometres to the north.
Some 600 operators, ages 20 to 25, work up to 40 hours a week - equipped with a French-sounding pseudonym and a carefully drilled French accent to raise the comfort levels of their customers.
Eight hours a day earns a starting salary of $200 US a week. Pay goes up to $500, plus benefits and bonuses, for the most productive operators.
Compared to the minimum wage of $1,200 offered their counterparts in France, it's not much. But for a country where minimum wage is $85 a week, it's a godsend.
Marina Guillaume, a 42-year-old hospital lab worker in St. Denis, France, never suspected that when she called her telephone service's toll-free number, the person answering was thousands of miles away.
"I had no idea, but if it can help a family survive, why not?" Guillaume said, then adds, "It's sad, though, that jobs are being lost here in France."
Posted by The Skipper
on 07/11/2004 at 06:07 PM
Filed Under: • Miscellaneous •
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