index of 2005 conference papers

Indian Call Centers: The Outsourcing of “Good Jobs” for Women

Doreen J. Mattingly
San Diego State University, U.S.

For the eight months since she has graduated from college, Preethi has worked nights in a New Delhi call center helping customers in California sort out problems their telephone bills. Her average workday begins at 4 pm when the company van picks her up at her house. By 5 pm she is at her desk getting her equipment and computer files ready, and at 5:30 pm, 7 am in California, the computer begins sending call to her workstation. The first hour is usually slow but by 6:30 she is on the phone constantly, a new call sent to her as soon as she finishes the last one. Preethi works hard and fast trying to perform each task perfectly; she can earn extra pay if she meets all of her targets. To do so is difficult; she must take at least 50 calls resolving the concerns of all the callers without errors, fallow all protocol on each call, and meet standards for average call length and time spent off the phone. During the shift she’ll have three breaks, two 15 minute breaks and one for thirty minutes --- just enough time to run to canteen for tea and a bite with her friends. She is careful to be back at her terminal on time – each second she is late reduces her chance to earn bonus pay. At 3:30 am she logs off, completes her paper work, attends a team meeting, and then gets on the van for the ride home. By 5 am she is in bed, hoping to fall asleep before the noise of her family’s morning routines awakens her.

Only 21, Preethi is the breadwinner in her household, providing the majority of the money to support her parents, grandparents, and sister; her father is out of work and her mother has never had a job. When she is not working, Preethi is studying for her MBA. She is an ambitious young woman. “I want a very high post,” she says. “I couldn’t have reached my goals on my parents’ income, but now I see possibilities.” Although Preethi found work in a call centre four days after graduating from college, her parents were not please with her decision. “People’s perception is that the job is easy money but bad because you work at night, smoke and drink. My parents said I shouldn’t do it but my friends said it’s not that bad…. Just after college my parents tried to marry me off. They were under pressure from relatives. They used to push me to get married but now see me as an asset. Now they see the virtue in my waiting to marry. Now they say that marriage is my decision.”

Do Preethi and the other young women working in call center “girls” have good jobs? Is the rapid transfer of telephone service work to India a good thing for the middle-class graduates like Preethi who are filling the jobs? Or is it yet another example of exploitation of third world workers by global capital? This paper does not answer the question completely, but does examine one dimension where the work does seem to be empowering: the changes it has made on their role in their parent’s household. Most of the young women working in call centers are unmarried college graduates. In traditional Indian culture these young, middle-class women should be entering into arranged marriages, or at the very least building high-status careers that will contribute to the reputation of their families. Instead they are out all night on the telephone with foreigners and often earning more than their fathers. In this paper I argue that women working in call centers are implicitly rejecting traditional patterns of family control over daughters, and in doing so they are resisting subordination. I do not mean to claim that these are all-around great jobs; there are some serious problems in the occupation. Nevertheless, because call centers make possible a rejection of a submissive, dependent role, they are in some ways ‘good jobs’ for young Indian women.

My comments here are based on research I conducted in the New Delhi metropolitan area from January to March 2005. While there I interviewed 20 call center workers and 10 managers; I am still in the process of transcribing and coding the interviews so my comments today are necessarily preliminary.

Call Centers

Since the 1970s, multinational corporations have moved to developing countries in search of unskilled or low-skilled factory workers. In the last decade outsourcing has expanded to include computer programming, office work, and increasingly telephone work. Call centers provide a wide range of telephone and occasionally internet services. Some are owned entirely by international companies such as IBM or American Express; others are independent and contract with multiple foreign companies. Many call centers are quite large, with 500-2500 seat telephone “factories” that feature multiple modes of contact (voice, data, and/or email and online chat) and a variety of services (helpline, telemarketing, complaint calls, order bookings, product inquiries, after sales support, and processing responses from direct marketing). The majority of call centers serving US customers are still located in the US, but increasingly English-speaking workers in more peripheral economies, especially India, are calling and taking calls from US households.

In recent years, India has become the largest and fastest-growing offshore site for US call centers. Since 2000, over 400 independent call centers have been set up in India, in addition to a big expansion in call center operations run by multinationals (Economist 2003). Most call centers are classified as ITES-BPO Information Technology Enabaled Services: Business Process Outsourcing. This industrial category in India earned 5.7 billion dollars in revenue in FY 2004-5; revenues have increased at over 50% per year since 2000. Total employment in ITES in fiscal year 2004-5 was 348,000 FY 2004-5, almost double the employment of 180,000 in FY 2002-03 (NASSCOM 2005).

Measures of salaries in the industry vary. One recent survey of call center workers (Ramesh 2004) found 53% had monthly salaries over Rs 10,000 (230 US$ at June 2005 exchange rate of 43.5 Rs/USD) while another (Singh and Pandey 2005) reported a majority of monthly salaries were below Rs 10,000. A survey conducted by NASSCOM, the Indian organization serving IT companies, reported median monthly salary for entry level “customer care executives” to be Rs. 11,200, and Rs 16,700 for senior CCEs. The discrepancy between the reports is probably due to the variation in salaries due to incentives paid for meeting performance targets. It is likely that the two independent surveys do not include incentives, while the third does, but none of them clarify this issue.

While this salary is low by US standards, it is quite high by Indian standards, especially for young people coming straight from college. It is almost twice the average monthly salary of Rs. 5900 (about US $135) reported in the 2001 census for all employed college educated women in India, and ten times the national minimum wage of Rs 1000 ($23) per month (Census of India, 2002).

All sources report that the majority of workers in call centers are under thirty, single, and have a bachelors degree or more. Although I’ve never seen national statistics on the gender composition of the occupation, all smaller studies and surveys report male female rations ranging from 40/60 to 60/40; the occupation of “customer care executive” (the industry term for telecallers) appears at this time to be an even mix of male and females. The industry has extremely high levels of turnover or “attrition,” as it is called in the industry.

Employment and Empowerment

In India the debate about women’s work in call centers is predictably divided. On the one side are pro free-market advocates who take the line that foreign investment is good for everyone by definition, particularly when it offers high wages (relative to other jobs in India) and improves productivity. Several recent books about globalization in general and outsourcing to India specifically have made this point. (e.g. Das 2001).

On the other hand, articles published in Indian feminist and labor publications are much more critical of call center employment, many calling the workers “cyber coolies.” Recent articles point out the following problems with call centers:

• Health effects of working night shifts (The Voice of the Working Woman 2004; Singh and Pandey 2005). “The continued stress and strain at work lead to circumstances where the female workers cannot carry on, especially during pregnancy and in situations of ‘double burden’ of work at family and workplace (Ramesh 2004, p. 29).
• Loss of identity created by serving foreign customers and speaking with an American or British accent (The Voice of the Working Woman 2004).
• The high degree of surveillance of workers. Supervisors can and do listen into calls at random, and computers generate daily reports of the performance of workers (Mazumdar 2004).
• High pressure to meet unreasonable quotas (Mazumdar 2004).
• Lack of opportunities for promotion or acquiring transferable skills (The Voice of the Working Woman 2004). One Indian study argued “a majority of [women] are engaged in a ‘dead-end’ career, where the workers do not ever move up the job ladder within their organization.”(Remesh 2004, p. 27).

A handful of studies that have looked at the home-work balance of married female call workers found women workers continued to be responsible for most housework (Pande 2003; Singh and Pandey 2005).. Based on this pattern one concluded that the occupation “has not really changed gender relations at home” (Pande 2003; 19) But Since mothers comprise such a small percentage of call center workers (5%-10%), the domestic role that is in fact most important to examine is not the wife role, but rather the role of daughter.

Previous have explored the effects of employment in foreign-owned factories on the role of daughters, some finding that that while factory employment was highly exploitative and paid very little, it gave daughters more resources to evade parental control and higher status in the household because of economic contributions (e.g. Ong 1987; Wolfe 1992). These studies provide an important baseline for looking at the effects of employment on the role of daughters in the household, although they are limited in that they all focus on the experience of poor and usually rural young women entering very low-wage unskilled factory work. Young women working in Indian call centers, on the other hand, necessarily come from middle-class families, as fluent English and a college education are requirements for the job.

The majority of Indian families are patriarchal, patrilinial and patrilocal. This means that the male head of household has authority to control the family labor production, property and sex; that caste and kin are transferred from father to son; and in marriage a woman is “transferred” from her birth family to her husband’s family. Most marriages are still arranged by parents, and a daughter’s reputation and purity are critical determinants of her marriagability. Although nuclear families are increasingly common in urban areas, the dominant household form remains the “joint family,” in which the families of sons live with their parents. Boys are valued as the father’s successor and the future supporters of parents, while daughters have less value and are often overtly or covertly seen as “a guest in the parent’s house” or “another’s property” (Majamudar 2004, p. 89). In rural and low-income households this can often translate into daughters receiving less food, medical treatment, and education. In educated urban families there is less discrimination of this sort (e.g. Krupalini and Bhat 2003), but typically there persist different rules and roles for daughters and sons. Daughters are socialized to be passive and dependent; sons successful and responsible. While parents expect economic support from sons, most consider it improper to accept such support from daughters (Majamudar 2004). Sons and daughters are typically socialized into dramatically different household duties, and female family members and servants do almost all domestic work and child care. Above all, the Indian family is also a basic unit to safe guard and practice caste system, and to protect and exchange caste interests.” (Krupalini and Bhat 2003: 64). In this formula, the virtue of a daughter is extremely important for the entire family, as “a daughter is an easy source of disrepute for the family, particularly before marriage” (Majamudar 2004, p. 90).

One obvious and significant way that work in call centers challenges and changes the position of Indian daughters is by physically taking her away from the home and family. Because call centers work at night, they often have little time to spend with other family members, even if they live at home. Most respondents reported that family relations suffered, as they saw their family less, and were often worn out and tired of talking when they did see them. In addition, workers complained of difficulty taking leave for extended family events, such as weddings. In general the workers said this was one of the problems with call center work. For example, Rucha said:

“So and the negative aspect of it maybe, at times, that family bonding which we are very used to, you miss out on that. So if you are on your own, then you have to be emotionally strong but that, that is the part that you miss out on. This job really makes you very dry in the sense when you go back home, you really don’t feel like talking to anybody so your parents end up thinking that probably she is having some problems that she doesn’t want to talk to, but what they don’t understand is the fact that I’ve been yapping most of the night and I am tired of speech and you get very irritated if there is any sort of noise around.”

In addition to the negative aspect of not being able to spend time with their family, the interviews revealed three other ways that call center work changed the relationship of young women working in call centers and their parents: 1) by increasing the workers’ financial independence, 2) by providing a workplace environment with a relative non-hierarchical culture, and 3) by endangering the sexual reputation of the workers. The combined effect of these three dynamics is a lessening of patriarchal control over the young women workers.

Financial independence

Employment in call centers changes the role of daughters in a number of obvious ways. First of all, because it gives young women a substantial income it eliminates their financial independence. The connection between financial independence and women’s autonomy has been a cornerstone of feminist economic analysis. There is no doubt that employment in call centers offers young women the opportunity for short-term financial independence, and even the ability to help support other family members.

The young women I interviewed varied in the degree to which they actually supported themselves or others. At one extreme end was one young woman from New Delhi who lived with her parents and spent all of her earnings on personal purchases (especially clothes and jewelry) and on entertainment (eating out, movies, and travel). Most Delhi women, however, gave to their family in the form of gifts. In the words of one respondent: “I give to my parents. Not in a monetary sense …. but I just buy gifts for them. My brother is staying here, he is doing his engineering degree, so I just give him some money and some gifts, I just take him to the market and buy him some food.”

The finances of young women from outside of Delhi, however, are quite different. Interestingly, a large survey of call center workers in Delhi both found that a just third of the workers were from the NCR (National Capital Region) of Delhi, meaning the majority of workers do not live with their parents (Ramesh 2004). Living in hotels, apartments, or with relatives, the workers from outside the Delhi area I interviewed were all responsible for their own expenses. In addition, many of these young women send money home. Ruchi lives in hostel. Her widowed mother, a secretary, lives with her younger brother in her home city of Lucknow. When asked about her spending, Ruchi reported “I pay my own bills first and then send what I can to my mother. I buy lots of gifts for her mother and younger brother, I really enjoy that…..Last year I took my mother to Bangalore. It was something she had always wanted to do.” In their recent survey of 100 young women working in call centers, Singh and Pandey (2005) found a fifth of the respondents reported family incomes of less than Rs. 20,000, making them “totally dependent on the respondent’s income from the call centre” (p. 19). Roughly a fifth were at the other end of the spectrum, reporting family incomes of more than Rs. 100,000 per month.

Another example of the economic independence among women working in call centers was they way they decided to spend their money. With one exception, the young women I interviewed did not follow their parents advice or instruction when it came to their earnings. The following statement is typical in this regard: “They want me to save, but when I tell them it’s very, I just started working so let me just enjoy it and then I’ll start saving when I have to get married, or when I think of getting married…So, they have a lot of issues regarding my spending habits….My dad was like, “You just got shoes last month, why have you got now? So many shoes you have!”

Apparent non-hierarchy of workplace

A second way that working in a call center challenged young women’s adherence to the traditional daughter role concerns submissiveness. Central to Indian gender-role ideology is the ideal of the submissive passive woman, and indeed these qualities are sought by families seeking wives for their sons.

Typical Indian workplaces, especially those where women are a minority, often reinforce the patriarchal relations of the home by reinforcing hierarchies of gender and age. In this regard, respondents reported that the international environment of the call center provided a very different type of environment than found in typical Indian companies.

Uniformly, male and female workers and managers reported that one characteristic of the international call centers was the informal nature of workplace relations. All respondents reported that in call centers male and female workers of all levels were able to “interact freely with everyone.” They also noted the lack of a dress code and the freedom for girls to wear western clothing, even skirts. Indeed, the free and fun environment of the call center has been widely reported in the Indian press.

Overall, the interviews and other reports on the industry suggest a non- hierarchical

workplace culture. One reason for the prevalence of a non-hierarchical culture in call centers is age: most managers and supervisors are in their 20s and 30s. A second reason is gender. Most call centers are gender integrated; at least 40% of workers are female. And while men do predominate at the highest levels, there are more women in management than is the case in most Indian workplaces. This is particularly true at the lowest levels of management, the team leaders who directly supervise the “executives.” The largest study to date of Delhi call centers found that 40% of team leaders where women (Ramesh 2004; 28). Finally, the fact that the work is “international,” that workers call foreigners and do the work of foreign-owned companies (even if the call center itself is Indian owned) influences the culture. In interviews it was evident that workers associate “openness,” and gender equality with westernization.

One young woman reported: “What I have noticed in my call center that everybody is very approachable. If you have a problem you can even walk up to a CEO and talk to him regarding that. Even if the CEO if we are sitting and having a lunch he can walk up to us and he can say “can I join you?” and we all have dinner and we all have lunch together. So, everybody is very approachable. It’s not that he is the CEO and we cannot go to him and cannot talk to him. Even if you have a personal problem, or if you have a problem or a problem regarding a team manager, you can walk up to your CEO and talk to him. So, everybody is very approachable.”

The egalitarian culture of call centers was particularly apparent to those who had worked in other jobs in Indian-owned companies. One respondent who had previously worked in an Indian-owned export house praised the relative lack of sexual harassment in call centers: “In my other office a guy might make a remark and I couldn’t reply. Here I could say, “just shut up,” but there I could not say it… In my other job I was the only girl so I got the attention of all the guys, not harassment exactly but special favors that you don’t want…but that doesn’t happen in call centers. Here a woman can be very free, she can speak her mind.” Sexual harassment is an arena where power and patriarchy in the workplace are especially apparent. The vast majority of my female respondents said they had not encountered sexual harassment. All of the male callers I interviewed said that the sexual harassment rules were unfair in that all claims of sexual harassment made by females were considered to be true and the accused male workers were automatically moved or fired. The managers I interviewed reported that a zero tolerance for sexual harassment was crucial, as they would never be able to get the labor they needed if parent thought their daughters would be harassed. While I’m certain that some sexual harassment does exist, my interviews indicated that it is less a regular part of workplace culture than seems to be the case in most co-ed work environments in India. In their (1986) study Liddle and Joshi found that sexual harassment (called eve-teasing in India) to be widespread in professional workplaces. They found the threat of sexual harassment, combined with the threat of rumors about women’s sexual impropriety, effectively kept women from interacting freely with male co-workers and cultivating relationships with mentors.

Let me clarify my argument here. I am not saying that call centers are a non-hierarchical workplace, or that they give actual power to workers. There is a strict management hierarchy and division of tasks, and the work of the “executives” who operate the phones is carefully monitored by computers. I am simply saying that the workplace culture, norms and expectations for daily behavior, dress, and conversation in the workplace, emphasizes openness and equality. This is important to my argument about the changing roles of daughters because unlike most Indian workplaces, the workplace cultures of international call centers do not reinforce cultural norms defining appropriate behavior based on age and gender. In fact the strict monitoring of performance by computers was seen my many young women as much fairer than traditional Indian norms of measuring work, which often discriminate against women.  

Freedom from control over sexuality

So far I’ve discussed two ways that employment in call centers challenges the control of patents over daughters: first by giving the daughters financial independence and second by not reinforcing patriarchal relations. In addition, call center employment goes against the typical pattern of middle-class women’s employment in that it does not improve the family’s status. In fact, the sexualization of call center workers can actually lower the status of female workers’ families.

In Daughters of Independence, Liddle and Joshi (1986) persuasively argue that men’s control over women is central to both caste and class in India. One feature of the capitalist class system has been the development of a middle class, which is linked to the pre-capitalist caste system in many ways, including the need for elites to control women’s sexuality and freedom. Following independence, new employment opportunities became available to some women of the middle class, especially in medicine, teaching, and government employment. Feminist scholars have persuasively argued that the new education and employment of middle-class women was shaped in a manner that directly benefited the men in their family (Liddle and Joshi 1984). Discrimination, limits on physical mobility and socializing with male coworkers, and exclusive responsibility for domestic work limited women’s professional advancement. At the same time, women’s earnings and status helped to distinguish middle-class families from the lower-class. Liddle and Joshi also found that the employment of middle-class women was controlled by their family (and husband’s family) and only allowed when the job they took was high enough in the occupational hierarchy to benefit the family and outweigh the inherent dishonor brought by a women working outside the home (108). They write “[R]espectability can be retained by minimizing the women’s sexual freedom on the job, and through emphasizing the economic and status benefits attaching to her occupation” (108).

This argument is extremely relevant for an analysis of call center work, since unlike other occupations favored by women from middle-class families, such as teaching or health care, there is no status or respectability associated with call center work. In fact, the occupation has such a low reputation that it can lower the status of the girl and, by association, her family. All of the respondents interviewed said that call center work had low status, a finding supported by other surveys of the occupation (Remash 2004; Singh and Pandey 2005).

For example, Mala reported that when she told people in her home town where she worked, they reply “Ah! It’s a call center. What are you doing in a call center?” I think that people don’t understand that a call center is also a job and… like any other job you have to work. I think people have this attitude because it’s very easy to get a job in a call center. Anybody can get a job at a call center, but what they don’t realize is that everybody cannot stick to a call center and that’s probably why the attrition rate is so high.”

Pandita made a similar point when I asked her parents’ opinion of her job: “Um, they are happy I’m earning well but the problem comes when they have to tell somebody else and then “What is your daughter doing there [in Delhi]?” If they have to say “Oh, she’s working in a call center,” they are not very proud of the fact that they have to mention it.”

But even more problematic for the families of workers, young women who work in call centers are sexually stigmatized. Because the work is done at night in a co-ed working environment, the employment of a young woman in this job can bring dishonor to her family. All of the respondents I interviewed were aware of negative stereotypes portraying call center girls as “loose” and “easy”. Not surprisingly, the female respondents also went to great lengths to assure me that this stereotype did not apply to them, but they also admitted that the reputation of their job was a problem for their family.

For example, after leaving a dead-end secretarial job in her home city in neighboring Rajhastan, Leela came to Delhi and found work in a call center. At her parents’ request she lived with the family of her grandfather’s sister. She said “The elders were fine, they were very sweet. But the grandson was narrow-minded. He thought girls who worked in the call centre have bad characters. He we suspicious of everything I did.” Leela responded by moving out of her relative’s house and into a hostel. She said she was lucky in that she had an unusual father who supported her having a career, but her mother still asks her to leave call center work and do something more respectable.

Unmarried female respondents also talked about the effect that their employment was likely to have on their marriage prospects. Shashi said: “If I get married I might have a lot of problems. Working in a call centre makes you independent, responsible for your own decisions. For a normal Indian male, women in call centers aren’t that reputed at all. I don’t care because I’m not looking to marry, but my parents wish I would. My relations with my parents are really strained…My parents are not really happy. Well they are happy about the money but not when they tell somebody else, they aren’t very proud. My parents think it’s better to get married but I’m used to earning my own money, being a housewife would be very difficult.”

The question of call center work and the sexuality of the workers deserved deeper analysis than I have time for here, as the image of sexually promiscuous middle-class girls challenges not just parental control but entire discourse of women’s sexuality and national identity in a globalizing India. Both Leela Fernandes (2001) and Rupa Oza (2001) argue that threats to women’s sexual purity have become a central theme in the opposition of globalization of both conservative nationalists and progressive critics. Even within the Indian feminist movement, women’s sexuality has largely been addressed in terms of women’s victimization and to a lesser degree women’s health (John and Nair 1998). Call center workers present a dramatic example of what they both oppose: the commodification of young women’s sexuality in the form of service work as well as an actual change in social codes. What is important for my argument is that the employment of daughters in this occupation does not increase the status of the men in her family, and can even lower it. Thus this tension over sexuality and call center work is as a rupture in the patriarchy in Indian family life.

Conclusion

I want to stress that my purpose is not to claim that call center jobs are inherently empowering to workers. The work is monotonous and grueling, night work and regular shift changes take a huge toll on health and social life, many workplaces have mandatory overtime, leaves can be difficult to get, the pace of the work is brutal, and most workers neither advance in the industry nor learn hard skills they can use in getting another job. But at the same time the work offers young women a means of escaping the rigid patriarchal control exercised over middle-class daughters. Specifically, working in international call centers gives young women financial independence (although possibly only short term) and a relatively egalitarian workplace. Also, because of the sexual stigma associated with the job, it violates norms surrounding the middle-class women’s employment, and does not bring status to the men in their families. In this respect, my analysis follows that of Liddle and Joshi (1986), who argue that women’s professional employment can be a site where women “resist their subordination.” (p. 109) and include a significant rejection of male control over female sexual and economic independence” (p. 109). While the women I interviewed are certainly subject to many types of control in the workplace, they are also breaking substantial taboos, and in some ways are rejecting the patriarchal control of their family. In this respect, call center jobs can be seen as emancipatory and transformative, with the potential to change women’s status in the family. In the words of Pandita: “Working in a call center makes you a very open minded person you take your own decisions, your earnings so you really are not depending on anybody. And you neither blame anybody for what ever happens, you are responsible for your own decisions, so that, at times that is causing problems. Like for a normal Indian male to accept a female working in a call center is really difficult.”

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index of 2005 conference papers