Anna Cater and Safina Uberoi, “Outsourced!” (2006)
An interesting and pleasant personalised film revolving around eight call-centre workers in India and Australia, “Outsourced!” examines the effect of the offshoring of call-centre jobs from First World countries like Australia to developing countries like India on both Australians and Indians alike; in particular, the impact of call-centre work on Indian society and attitudes towards working women, gender relations, marriage and life-styles. The film tackles these topics by following four female call-centre workers in Gurgaon, a burgeoning hi-tech satellite city on the outskirts of New Delhi in northern India. To a much lesser extent, the film also looks at how the outsourcing of call-centre jobs and similar white collar jobs will affect the Australian workforce and Australian people’s attitudes towards Indians and other people in countries where Australian industry and the jobs associated with them are flying to.
Through interviews and a voice-over narrator, the film itself flies back and forth between its Indian interviewees and Australian interviewees, contrasting the very different attitudes of Indians and Australians towards call-centre work. In Australia, call-centre work carries lesser prestige than most other white-collar jobs and many workers are employed on a casual or temporary basis; no special qualifications are thought necessary to apply for a call-centre customer service job. In India on the other hand, working in a call centre is considered highly prestigious and many people with impressive university qualifications – one of the Gurgaon-based women featured is a medical professional – hanker and compete for such work though it is stressful and tiring and makes considerable demands on Indian workers. Indian employees spend a great deal of training time perfecting their accents in speaking English so they are not suspected by Australian callers of being foreigners. Many Indians also have to unlearn what they were taught about saving money and only buying what they need and/or if they can afford it: buying things on credit and taking out a mortgage on a house are not only unusual and unfamiliar activities for these workers but the very nature of these activities may strike them as unethical and morally suspect.
The effect of working in call-centres on Indian women is dramatic: a generation of young female call-centre workers is discovering financial freedom and independence, and this discovery is generating a demand for goods and services which in turn leads to a rise in retail jobs and businesses, construction of shopping malls and an accompanying rise in the value of commercial real estate as more land must be made available to build shops and other businesses. (Nothing is said about how such results might be having an adverse effect on slums and slum-dwellers, farms, wildlife reserves and areas where tribal peoples live.) Call-centre workers work in groups and teams, forcing young men and women of different ethnicities, religions and social levels to rub shoulders: Western work habits and values must be learned and adhered to, distinctions of caste are breaking down, traditional ideas about how unrelated men and women should interact are falling away, people no longer care what religion their boyfriends and girlfriends belong to, women are putting off marriage and starting families at a later age, and a new youth culture based on a fusion of Western youth culture and local Indian cultures is developing in new night-clubs and other places frequented by the workers in their free time with cash to spare. Just to watch these young Indians, men and women, boldly negotiating a new path for themselves and their families, confronting old ways of thinking and behaving, defying family and cultural traditions, and contemplating and relishing personal ambitions and goals hitherto alien to their families and culture, can be very dizzying and uplifting; imagine then, what effect this generation of youngsters might have on Indian society in the future. (This is assuming that current trends in global offshoring of jobs to India will continue, and that assumption cannot be taken for granted.) At the same time though, a new Indian youth culture might end up having a homogenising effect on Indian society and much about traditional Indian cultures that’s seen to be incompatible with Western and fusion Western / Indian culture may well be lost forever to our detriment.
Back in Australia, call-centre workers ruefully accept that they can’t stop jobs going off to developing countries. Some are happy that Indian people who’d otherwise live in poverty are able to earn money and live comfortably. Australian employers interviewed talk about how Australia must develop more highly skilled work for IT and other white-collar professionals but this depends on universities and TAFE colleges being able to educate and train people to the standard required. Obviously if the Australian government continues to cut funding to higher education and does nothing about the working conditions and job security of Australian university and TAFE teachers – about two-thirds of Australian university academics are employed as sub-contractors and have no job security or holiday and sick leave provisions – then the highly skilled hi-tech professionals required will become very scarce and this will be Australia’s loss. As for India, some people there are already concerned that countries like China and Sri Lanka will compete with India for call-centre work and some such jobs in India will flow to those countries; in the not too distant future, countries like South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria will also join the competition with even cheaper English-speaking labour.
No statistics are offered in this program and the documentary doesn’t look at any trends likely to affect globalised call-centre work or whether it will even last well into the 21st century. Rapid changes in technology could all but make call-centre work redundant in the next 10 or 20 years. The film accepts that call-centre work in its present predatory form, migrating to whichever country can offer the cheapest, most compliant labour and cutting a swathe through traditional society and ways of thinking and acting wherever it goes, is here to stay: no challenge or alternative ways of working are offered. For that bleak and unsatisfying outcome, I leave the film in some despair.
Iam an Indian and have a good understanding of this industry...there is a big misconception in the west that only 'Call Centre' jobs are outsourced and some how these people employed in Indian call centres are highly educated. In reality these workers have similar or lesser education skills than their western counterparts. Most of the engineers actually work on software development which is a different and more lucrative industry and connected deeply with large western corporations and the technology industry in the silicon valley. Already most of the call centre jobs have gone to the Philippines...so I guess the film is already a bit dated.