Caller Hate the Orchestrated Production of Western Nationalism - Kiran Mirchandani

7/28/2019 Caller Hate the Orchestrated Production of Western Nationalism - Kiran Mirchandani

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Economic & Political Weekly EPW June 22, 2013 vol xlviII no 25 69

Kiran Mirchandani ([email protected]) is at the Adult

Education and Community Development Program, OISE/University of

Toronto, Toronto, Canada.

Caller Hate: The Orchestrated Productionof Western Nationalism

Kiran Mirchandani

Customer anger has been recognised as one of the

most stressful dimensions of jobs in Indias transnational

call centres. While angry customers exacerbate worker

stress and intensify the need for training, they also serve

a productive purpose in the everyday creation and

perpetuation of western nationalism. The western state

and public discourses on offshoring sanction customer

aggression on calls; these calls provide opportunities

for customers to exercise citizenship rights over jobs

which are assumed to have been stolen, and in so doing,

continually define and then protect assets (jobs) which

belong to the nation. In essence, customers in the west

enact patriotism through their anger.

In a radio programme in Philadelphia some years ago, the

host made a mock service call to India and referred to the

customer service worker who answered as a dirty rat eater.

While this caused outrage amongst listeners, it was also ac-

knowledged that workers in India are, in fact, routinely subject

to such abuse (Thanawala 2007). The widespread prevalence

of irate customers during voice-based service interactions

has been identified as amongst the most stressful dimensions

of business process outsourcing (BPO) workers jobs. A surveyof call centre workers in India revealed that 77% experienced

high stress, and 45% of these attributed this stress primarily

to customer abuse (Dhillon 2008). Constructed as an organi-

sational problem, the unending stream of angry customers is

widely acknowledged to lead to health problems and high turn-

over amongst call centre workers (Sengupta and Gupta 2013).

Two sets of arguments are made in the organisational stud-

ies literature to explain the prevalence of angry customers dur-

ing telephone-based interactions. The first relates to the dis-

connect between customer desires for personalised attention

and the lower-cost scripted customer service which most

organisations provide. The second focuses on the importance

of training where workers can learn voice, accent and soft skillsto diffuse and appease irritated callers. In this article, I argue

that the construction of angry customers as an organisational

problem sidesteps the social, economic and historical context

within which the transnational service economy is situated. I

ask what are the productive consequences of customer anger

and how is this anger legitimised? I argue that customer ser-

vice interactions provide a forum for the re-inscription of

boundaries through expressions of relations of power between

individuals located in different national contexts.

I explore the backlash to offshoring and the effect of this

backlash on the work experiences of customer service agents in

India, drawing on interviews conducted between 2002 and

2010 with 100 workers in Indian call centres. I argue that tran-

snational customer service interactions have become a forum

for the exercise of an orchestrated everyday nationalism for cus-

tomers in the west. Western nationalism takes two forms in rela-

tion to Indian customer service work. First, it involves the crea-

tion of the boundaries within which nation states exist. Rather

than a focus on a physical territory, this takes the form of the

assignment of citizenship to jobs, whereby national ownership

is attributed to and claimed to inherently reside in certain jobs.

Customer service jobs, typically feminised, poorly paid and de-

valued in the west, are deemed possessions of American, British


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June 22, 2013 vol xlviII no 25 EPW Economic & Political Weekly70

or Australian citizens. In this manner, jobs are personified and

bestowed a citizenship. A second form of nationalism involves

the construction of Indians as thieves who threaten the jobs

which belong to the nation and its citizens (Ahmed 2004).

Researchers, writers, journalists and worker advocacy

groups have collectively amassed a wealth of knowledge on the

violent, aggressive and racist nature of many customer-service

interactions between Indian agents and customers in US, UK

and Australia. Western customers being served by Indian sales

and service agents frequently use words and tones which

would constitute harassment in face-to-face settings. It is com-

mon for customers to make derogatory comments about India

and Indians during calls. Workers routinely hear phrases

such as you f****** cow (Dhillon 2008), you Indians suck

(Lakshmi 2005), terrorist (Poster 2007: 287), F*** off you job-

stealing Paki (Foster 2005), and you bloody Indians, m*****

f*****s, youre taking our jobs (Nath 2008: 718). One worker,

interviewed as part of this project (Mirchandani 2012) reports:

They dont take the people in India as human beings mostly. They dont

treat them as human beings. They say that the Indians are like downmarket or something like that. They have that idea in their mind.

Another agent says, The moment they know you are from

India, they directly say, I should not be telling this to you

F****** Indian . As comments such as these reveal, customer

assessments of customer service are often inextricably tied to

attributions made to peoples and nations. In this sense, such

expressions of customer anger are also articulations of cus-

tomer sentiments about nations both their own and that of

the service provider. Fox and Miller-Idriss argue that the na-

tion is not simply the product of macro-structural forces; it is

simultaneously the practical accomplishment of ordinary peo-

ple engaged in routine activities (2008: 536). Such everyday

nationalism is an act of production (2008: 550). The orches-trated nature of this production is the focus of this article.

Nation in Production

While understandings of nationalism have traditionally

been limited to social movements focused on the creation or

protection of national borders, theorists note that nations are

in fact created and produced on an everyday basis. Fox and

Miller-Idriss (2008: 539) provide examples in daily life such

as sporting events or physical catastrophes which provide

the forum for people to talk with the nation and exercise

nationhood. Similarly, through their evaluation of elite dis-

courses, such as speeches made by politicians, individuals

talk about the nation which serves to foster national solidar-

ities. These contexts provide the opportunity for people to

express commonality with others in the nation.

Such nationalism has been referred to as banal and in-

cludes mundane practices which continually serve as re-

minders of the nation. Examples include flags displayed un-

noticed in public buildings or sports pages in daily newspapers

which encourage readers to support a national cause (Billig

1995). Political speeches and media debates on issues of

national interest give rise to everyday language and practices

of nationalism amongst the general public (Skey 2009; Billig

2009). Such a focus on banal nationalism suggests that rather

than a thing, a nation is in fact a contingent process (Skey

2011: 12). Based on interviews with members of the ethnic ma-

jority in Britain, Skey documents the ways in which everyday

talk about lives, work and news stories are guided by a na-

tional frame of reference which is taken for granted. He

argues that it is through peoples daily engagement with, and

mutual recognition of, these everyday symbols, institutional

arrangements, famil iar places and social practices that having

a national communitymakes sense (2011: 152, italics re-

moved). As Fox and Miller-Idriss (2008: 549) note, the near

complete assimilation of nationhood into the realm of the ordi-

nary testifies to its prosaic power.

The focus on people giving meaning to notions of the nation

through their everyday interactions allows for the considera-

tion of the context in which the routine expression of customer

anger against transnational customer service interactions is

based. Customers in the US, UK and Australia evaluate public

discourse and political speeches on offshoring. They evaluate

debates on the value or threat of offshoring for their nation,and depending on the outcome of their deliberations, they en-

act the nation through their conversations with agents in India.

Methods

This article is based on interviews conducted between 2002 and

2010 with 100 transnational customer service workers located

in three cities in India (Mirchandani 2012 for a complete discus-

sion of the findings from this study). Seventy-eight respondents

were frontline customer-service representatives (43 male and 35

female) and the remainder were trainers, managers and team

leaders. Call centre workers interviewed were employed with

transnational organisations and provided voice-based customer

service support in a broad range of sectors. Most workers re-ceived calls from customers who had dialled toll-free numbers

in the west, and a few made sales calls to prospective customers

in the west. Some calls were short, and involved providing sup-

port on credit card payments, catalogue sales, lost baggage, etc,

while others involved longer conversations with customers to

resolve technical difficulties, set up mortgages, or process insur-

ance claims. During confidential interviews which were held at

a non-organisational site, workers were asked to describe their

work histories, experiences of training and on the job interac-

tions with co-workers, customers and managers, and career as-

pirations. The aim of interviews was to explore how people re-

counted their work histories and made sense of the decisions

that they made as they navigated their personal and profession-

al lives (Maynes et al 2008).

A large proportion of workers interviewed raised the issue

of irate customers. This article traces workers experiences

with angry customers in the context of public and state dis-

courses on offshoring, occurring mostly in the US, but also in

the UK and Australia.

Organisational Narratives on Customer Aggression

Customer anger in Indias BPO sector has been widely recog-

nised as a serious organisation problem. There have been two


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approaches to this problem. First, some theorists note that cus-

tomer dissatisfaction may be more intense in cross-border

interactions but in fact pervades the call centre sector as

a whole. Cost reduction pressures prompt organisations to

rationalise processes and streamline work to reduce costs and

increase efficiency. At the same time, many companies market

their products on the basis of the excellent customer service.

Marek Korczynski and Ursula Ott (2004) summarise that

management reconciles the dual logics of customer orienta-

tion and organisational efficiency by promoting the myth of

customer sovereignty. While the customers think they are the

most important actors in service interactions, the production

process in fact structures the exchange. The service workers

job is to guide the customer through the constraints posed by

the way in which the production process is set up. In call cen-

tres, for example, workers are often required to follow pre-

defined protocols that limit possible customer responses. Work-

ers often use menus to provide customers with choices from pre-

established lists and are strongly encouraged to speed-up inter-

actions so that they can take the maximum number of calls pershift. When customers realise the limits of these structures, dis-

satisfaction leads to angry customers. Such an approach sug-

gests that more efficient work processes (such as shorter wait

times, more efficient menus, more agents on duty at peak times,

better technology) would ameliorate customer anger.

The problem of automated, routinised processes within call

centres is exacerbated by employees with poor skills. Cus-

tomers become angrier when they have difficulty understand-

ing agents or being understood by them, and by agents poor

customer-handling techniques. Accordingly, researchers note

that training on voice and accent, as well as in emotional labour,

can reduce customer anger (Kumar and Prakash 2008). One

trainer, interviewed for this project, summarises:

[T]here used to be people who were very weak and they used to have

a lot of regional accent. As long as you satisfy your customer with

whatever queries they have, they do not have a problem wherever in

the world they are calling, but if the customer is not able to follow

the question, or if the person is not able to satisfy their questions or

queries then they used to get rea lly mad at us.

Organisational responses to the problem of angry custom-

ers have, accordingly, focused on training agents, both in

voice and accent, as well as asking workers to engage in the

emotional labour of being empathetic to customers on the

telephone. There is evidence that other minor adjustments

to the labour process have also been made which allow

agents to disconnect calls after repeated slurs, or maintain a

database to prevent calls from particularly persistently abu-

sive customers. Some companies also provide access to

sports facilit ies, massages or therapists to help workers cope

with the negative psychologica l impact of being victims of

constant customer abuse (Dhillon 2008). While these at-

tempts have not always been successful in appeasing angry

customers, or reducing the negative impact of this abuse on

workers, these strategies continue to be widely promoted to

deal with the negative consequences of the prevalence of

abusive customers.

The Economy of Customer Aggression

Despite the widespread acknowledgement of the negative

effects of customer anger on workers, however, surprisingly

little has changed in the intensity and frequency of this prob-

lem in the decade that has passed since the large-scale offshor-

ing of customer service work to India in the early 2000s. In an

article entitled, I Just Called to Say I Hate You, Srivastava

(2005) documents the growing rate of customer abuse, quot-

ing a young woman working in a Mumbai call centre who says:

Earlier, people would get abusive if we didnt answer their

questions satisfactorily. Now, I get calls on some days up to

five a shift from people who are calling only to abuse. De-

spite the attention that has been paid to the issue of customer

aggression, by and large, the problem of irate callers has only

become more widespread. As noted by a health minister in

India, Teenagers straight out of school and collegeare col-

lapsing in front of their computers because of insulting British

callers (Dhillon 2008).

Ahmed argues that feel ings, such as the hate which gives

rise to customer anger, should not be conceptualised as a sen-timent which just resides in individuals. Rather, it forms an

economy in the sense that it is productive and circulates by

sticking figures of hate together, transforming them into a

common threat (2004: 15). Probing the economy of irate

customers raises questions such as how does customer anger

create particular subject positions? How is it sanctioned? What

purpose does it serve? By exploring these questions, I argue

that the western state and public discourses on offshoring

sanction customer aggression on calls; these calls provide op-

portunities for customers to exercise citizenship rights over

jobs which are assumed to have been stolen, and in so doing,

continually define and then protect assets (jobs) which belong

to the nation. Customers enact patriotism through their anger.Customer anger on calls to India is sanctioned through a com-

bination of state and public discourses on offshoring. There is

a circulation between the ideas expressed in these state and

public discourses and the ways in which the American public

consumes these ideas and in turn talks about them.

Debating Offshoring: Sanctioning Customer Abuse

Although abusive customers were common in the early 2000s

and provoked complex organisational strategies of hiding the

location of callers (Poster 2007), the prevalence of anger on

calls intensified after the 2004 American presidential election

race. In the weeks leading up to the election, candidate John

Kerry made the following promise,

When I am President, and with your help, were going to repeal every

benefit, every loophole, every reward that entices any...company or

CEO to take the money and the jobs overseas and stick the American

people with the bill (National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP

2007, April, p 1).

Kerrys position added fuel to a debate which was clearly

already occurring in many circles. In high profiles forums such

as Lou Dobbs Exporting America series, business leaders were

targeted with public shaming for allegedly exporting Ameri-

can jobs to overseas locations. These efforts served to define


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certain people within the nation as traitors. Offshoring busi-

nesses, some of which were state-aligned organisations, were

constructed as traitors it was found, for example, that the

customer service activities for a New Jersey food stamp pro-

gramme, which was operated by a private contractor, had

been shifted to India. In light of this case a community leader

is reported as saying, it is unconscionable to send state-funded

jobs overseas in the face of the staggering number of un-

employed New Yorkers (Madore 2004: 1). Similar trends were

occurring in Australia where customers responded with out-

rage to the publicity about Indian workers dealing with Coles

Myers credit inquiries. In the UK, in 2003, the Communica-

tions Workers Union launched a high profile campaign focus-

ing on British Telecoms (BT) decision to outsource work to

India. By adopting a nationalist protectionist frame (Downey

and Fenton 2007: 663) the union held BT responsible for

exporting British jobs.

For the past decade, this discourse on offshoring has contin-

ued unabated. In response to the economic crisis of 2009,

Obama is quoted as saying:Its time to finally slash the tax breaks for companies that ship our jobs

overseas and give those tax breaks to companies that create jobs in the

United States of America[About the current tax system] Its a tax

code that says you should pay lower taxes if you create a job in Banga-

lore, India, than if you create one in Buffa lo, USA (Anthony 2010: 1).

In his 2012 State of the Union address, Obama again made

an impassioned speech about the dangers of offshoring, say-

ing, Its time to stop rewarding businesses that ship jobs over-

seas, and start rewarding companies that create jobs right here

in America. Later that year, the debate on offshoring once

again took centre stage during the presidential election cam-

paign. Part of Obamas campaign strategy was to cast Romney

as a pro-offshoring politician. Obama produced a map entitled Mitt Romneys Record: Outsourcing American Jobs (http://

www.barackobama.com/outsourcing-map/) which listed job

losses and offshoring contracts supported by Romney in vari-

ous states. These strategies are indicative of the traitor talk

which attempts to deface individuals and organisations which

fail to protect American jobs under threat.

At the centre of these speeches and public discussions is the

very notion of an American or British job. These are the pri-

mary citizens which are deemed in need of protection in

these discussions. In direct contrast to the free trade language

of mobility and international exchange, jobs are claimed as

citizens of particular western nations. These citizens are con-

ceptualised as being under threat, and patriotic duty demands

their preservation. The threat is posed by thieves who are

seen to be those outside the nation attempting to take what is

rightfully not theirs. Jobs as citizens are protected in the US

through the introduction of hundreds of bills in state legis-

latures since the early 2000s. Most recently, in December 2011

President Obama announced the tabling of the US Call Centre

Worker and Consumer Protection Act which aims to force

companies to disclose the location of their customer service

centres and pay taxes accordingly. This bill forms one of

hundreds tabled to curb offshoring in the past decade. Despite

the volume of bills filed, surprisingly, however, almost all

these bills have failed in the past decade because they violate

free trade agreements in place.

In 2004, for example, when over 200 bills were tabled in state

legislatures in the US, only five became law. Another 190 bills

were introduced in 2005 and 2006, out of which only seven be-

came law. The bills passed promote better disclosure or data col-

lection on offshoring and none have had a significant impact on

the broader trend towards offshoring (NFAP 2007). As Emilcar

(2012: 220) notes, despite the continued introduction of anti-

offshoring proposals in state legislatures, these bills are unlikely

to become law because they violate pre-existing agreements

which the US has signed such as the Agreement on Government

Procurement and NAFTA. Significantly, these bills are debated

actively in the legislature and the media and provide a forum for

public officials to express nationalist sentiments on the need to

protect the jobs assumed to belong to their electorate.

The Business Debate

These issues, often presented as a pro- or anti-offshoring de-bate provide the opportunity for a focused, active discussion

on whether western national interests are served or under-

mined by offshoring an issue on which politicians as well as

the general public (who are the customers who interact with

Indian agents) have a variety of opinions. The framing of the

debate is often one where business interests supporting off-

shoring are pitted against the interests of workers and the

nation (Nadeem 2011). The pro-offshoring camp, often repre-

sented by business leaders, stresses the long-term benefit of

lower consumer costs and better organisational efficiency

made possible. Compelling arguments are made about com-

pany decisions to offshore it is noted for example, that had

Hewlett Packard not outsourced 30,000 jobs it would havebeen unable to survive its competitive business environment,

jeopardising 1,00,000 jobs (Bhagwati 2011).

In this way, pro-trade business leaders argue that offshoring is

necessary to secure US corporate success in the era of globalisa-

tion. In making this argument, however, like those who oppose

offshoring, they aim primarily to protect their nation. McKenna

(2011), in a study of business leaders perceptions of India and

China notes that senior executives in the west construct these

countries as having volatile, bureaucratic and less developed

economies in comparison to the disciplined, fair and progressive

economy of the US. Indians and Chinese are seen as less equal

and less free workers, who want standards of living enjoyed by

citizens of western nations, and have little choice but to work

hard to achieve this. McKenna notes that business leaders per-

petuate a neocolonial discourse where the west is seen as ad-

vanced and India or China as backward. In a rather paternalistic

fashion, offshoring is said to allow for global economic develop-

ment with the more advanced countries helping economies

which are seen to be at earlier stages of development.

Other researchers whose work contributes to the pro-

offshoring side of the debate highlight the need for the crea-

tion of better jobs locally. They note that there is no clear

evidence of the relationship between job loss and offshoring.


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Batt et al (2009: 46), for example, find based on their survey of

2,477 call centres in 17 countries that

call centre employment as a percentage of the workforce appears to be

stable or growing in advanced economies...While evidence suggests

that call centre employment is growing more rapidly in countries such

as India and the Philippines, there is little evidence that employment

is shifting from advanced to emerging markets.

The UK government has similarly noted that offshoring had

generated a net benefit for Britain by maximising profits and

lowering consumer costs (Downey and Fenton 2007: 664).

The 2007 US Bureau of Labor Statistics reveals that only 2% of

the recent layoffs within companies of more than 50 employ-

ees cited offshoring as a factor (NFAP 2007: 9).

In contrast, the anti-offshoring camp focuses on human in-

terest stories profiling individuals who were experiencing job

loss. ANew York Times Fathers Day editorial, for example,

characterised offshoring as a form of intimate, familial rob-

bery (quoted in Palm 2006: 2). As Palm (2006) notes,

The most resonant human interest stories followed workers who had

lost their manufacturing jobs during one or another recession, thenmanaged to finance their own reskilling, and now are losing the very

white-collar jobs that they had fashioned themselves to qualify for.

The plight of these versatile and resilient workers are a central con-

cern for anyone sympathetic to labor in the US (p 2).

Indeed, despite evidence from several studies, as Mordecai

(2005: 95) reports, most Americans view offshoring and out-

sourcing as a major cause of unemployment in the United

States; polls have indicated that as many as sixty-nine per cent

of Americans believe that offshoring damages the economy of

the United States. They act on this view by exercising their

consumer choices such as preferring domestic products and

judge services provided by foreigners as inferior (Bhardwaj

2007). In contrast to the findings of researchers who cite theweak relationship between offshoring and layoffs, researchers

such as Hira and Hira (2005) provide evidence which traces the

offshore expansion of individual companies and links this ex-

pansion to corresponding downsizing in the west. This link is

also perpetuated through media stories which very frequently

report on offshoring in the context of layoffs or joblessness in

the US (Mordecai 2005: 102; Nadeem 2011: 15).

Notions of patriotism are also often evoked in the anti-

offshoring side of the debate. Lane provides an example of a

hi-tech job-seeker in Dallas who compares computer program-

ming with baseball and apple pie, that is, a quintessentially

American occupation. Offshoring, in this context, is unpatri-

otic, with the potential long-term ill effect of encouraging

future generations of Americans from entering this profession.

Lanes study reveals that most unemployed tech workers in

fact support the offshoring of lower-end computer program-

ming. However, this too is based on the assumption of the

superiority of their nation as they see the offshoring of lower

level work as allowing Americans to perform high-end work

only (Lane 2004).

The anti-offshoring side of the debate is also actively pro-

moted by politicians through speeches and bills introduced in

state legislatures as discussed earlier in this section. On a

day-to-day basis, however politicians simultaneously reconcile

the contradictions in their anti-offshoring stance with the fact

that US state policy also supports an explicitly opposite strat-

egy of trade. During a presidential visit to India in 2010,

for example, Obama dealt with objections from the Indian

prime minister to his anti-offshoring rhetoric. Obama is quot-

ed as telling business leaders in India that there still exists a

caricature of India as a land of call centres and back-offices

that cost American jobs. But these old stereotypes, these old

concerns, ignore todays realities (Alexander 2010). Not sur-

prisingly, therefore, despite Obamas vociferous objection to

offshoring during his 2012 election campaign, Indian business

leaders welcomed his re-election. Gottipatti (2012) reports

that most outsourcing industry leaders in India said they

believed that much of Mr Obamas criticism of outsourcing

was campaign rhetoric, and that it would not actually affect

his policy decisions. These policy decisions have by and large

been pro-business.

While on one level, anti-offshoring sentiments are simply

state propaganda to appease concerns about local unemploy-ment, they are not benign. They legitimise a way of being and

talking which is exercised daily during transnational customer

service interactions. Billig (2009: 349) notes that the media

often does not transmit a single, coherent message about the

nation: there are continual controversies, debates and dilem-

mas. The construction of the issue of offshoring as debate

suggests the neutral, balanced and useful working out of a

complex issue which has pros and cons. Mordecai (2005: 85-86)

summarises, a tremendous divide has opened up in the US

between those who support offshoring and those who are

staunchly opposed. Yet, while these debates rage in the west,

Indian customer service agents are at the forefront of customer

expressions of their position. Based on their ethnocentric bias,work experience, engagement with media, consumption of

propaganda and participation in political processes, customers

form their views on offshoring. They may participate in the

debates on offshoring by contributing to blogs, writing res-

ponses to articles and talking to friends. Most importantly,

however, customers respond by enacting their objections or

support of offshoring during customer service interactions.

Anger at the Thieves: Expressing the Nation

Discussions of offshoring in the media and amongst politicians

in the west suggest that the virtues of offshoring for the nation

are debatable and part of a dialogue to be had in the spirit of

the free exchange of ideas. Overall, the issue of offshoring is

said to concern jobs which belong to the west but are being

shifted to countries with lower labour costs. While bounded by

a common interest in securing the economic sovereignty of the

west, there are varying perspectives in the public discourse on

offshoring on the best way to achieve this goal. Some argue

that the west would benefit from leaving routine, labour-

intensive service work to poorer nations, while others say that

offshoring includes the loss of high quality jobs. Offshoring

is constructed as an issue involving jobs, quality of life and

service quality issues of deep concern to all citizens. In the


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absence of any ongoing, organised forum to air their views

within the west customers voice their views on these issues on

the telephone during customer service interactions.

Accordingly, workers interviewed for this project note that

not all customers are negative about offshoring. They explain:

There are some clients who are very good and they like the way [we]

speak. They say, what US people couldnt do you guys are doing [so]

even if [we] call at night [you] are there for [us]. Yes, their response

is good but at times there are some people who dont like jobs being

outsourced of India because they lose out the opportunity. You could

find all types of people there.

Sometimes we come across people who are so good. They are like, oh

India, okay. Its a nice place and all. They try to actually make us feel

good. Some people are really good. And yes, we do come across people

who abuse us a lot.

While experiences of pleasant customers were reported,

almost all workers interviewed said that their work involves

dealing with abusive and aggressive customers on a daily

basis. Workers draw a direct parallel between political and

public discourses on offshoring occurring in the west and their

experience on calls, as one man explains, What happened is itwas publicised and Bush didn't want outsourcing going on, so

they all knew that jobs are being outsourced and their ac-

counts are being dealt with in India, so they knew about. An-

other worker notes, Are you Indian? Theyll give me as many

bad languages they have: Dont talk to me. What you did on

September 11th, World Trade Centre...There was a bomb blast

in UK...That day, not a single UK guy was talking with us. You

did a bomb blast. Don't talk with us. Get lost. As one worker

summarises, the minute you say India, I mean they use all

kind of words that you cant even imagine.

Mansfield and Mutz analysis of Americans attitudes towards

offshoring reveals that perspectives are shaped more by pre-

existing political or ethnic biases than by job experiences. Demo-crats, union members or those who are anti-trade tend to react

negatively to offshoring compared to those who are pro-business

or Republican. Manfield and Mutz (2011: 1) conclude that

attitudes are shaped less by the economic consequences of this phenom-

enon than by a sense of us versus them. In general, the term offshor-

ing triggers a sensitivity to nationalistic sentiments that encourages

extremely negative views of outsourcing. Accordingly, one worker

reports, because they ruled us they think were inferior. [They] dump

the phone when they find out that they [are] calling India.

Objections to offshoring in the west are, in this context, ex-

pressions of nationalism. Poster (2007) argues that turning

outsourcing into a symbol of nationalism helps politicians ob-

scure and evade larger issues like de-industrialisation, the

withering state support for workers, sky-rocketing health costs,

and declining real wages (p 283). Indeed, the link drawn be-

tween job loss and offshoring facilitates the notion that Indians

are thieves. The discourses of stranger danger (Ahmed 2000)

are vividly illustrated in the Communications Workers Union

2003 campaign called Pink Elephant Stop the Job Stampede

to India, and described by Downey and Fenton (2007):

The visual centerpiece of the CWU campaign is an 18-foot inflatable

pink elephant, Perky, aided by a person dressed as a pink elephant,

Pinky . Pinky appears variously on campaign material as the villain of

the piece: he is carrying suitcases and heading for India; kicking over

boxes bearing the words UK jobs, UK economy, UK customers, UK

revenues. In one poster...Pinky is seen answering a call while sitting

in front of an Eastern cityscape from a tearful white woman who has

lost her call centre job and wants to speak on the telephone to the job

centre (pp 659-60).

The rhetoric of fear in relation to India and Indians is rampant.

In a speech introducing a bill on offshoring in the Oregon legisla-

ture, Senator Ron Wyden notes, an off-shoring tsunami is bear-

ing down on workers in the information technology and services

sector (www.govtrack.us). Meredith (2005) similarly argues,

Over the next decade, offshoring will knock millions of white-collar

Americans and Europeans out of work, blowing a hole in the middle

class from Los Angeles to London, from Boston to Berlin, from Toledo

to Tokyo, from Austin to Amsterdam...call it the revenge of the colo-

nies, but any developing country with lots of English speakers and

good Internet links is now a prime jobs magnet (pp 1, 5).

Poster (2007: 297) draws parallels between these efforts in

fearmongering and the Bush rhetoric on the war on terror.

She notes,The rhetoric of empire is apparent in Indian call centres not through

an explicit language of racial superiority but through the mediating

language of terror and the denigration of South Asian, Middle Eastern,

and Muslim identities. Globalized service work is providing a new forum

for everyday citizens to articulate this kind of nationalised rhetoric.

Customer Nationalists

Anti-offshoring debates enable customer expressions of pa-

triotism. These expressions, however, can take on a decidedly

racist character. In the context of power differentials between

western customers and Indian service providers, customers

have the power to express their objections to offshoring (and

participate in the debate) through the exercise of racism. Oneworker, interviewed for a news report comments, when some

callers are unhappy with the service, their frustration often

turns racist... they would say, This is why you should not han-

dle our work. Indians are not good enough (Lakshmi 2005:

A22). Dealing with racism or cultural gap frustration is part

of the job as one worker reports:

Since it's my job and I am in the service industry, I have to accept

it. Andthey are like, yelling because of some kind of frustration.

Whatever frustration it iswhether there is cultural gap frustra-

tion or bad temper, whatever frustration it is, my job is tocalm that

person down.

In line with politicians who depict offshoring companies as

traitors to the nation, customers who do not support offshor-

ing sometimes refuse to talk to agents in India, or express their

anger on the telephone. One man says, If they come to know

that you are [in] India, then they get wild, because they dont

want people from India taking calls for them, they ask you to

transfer the calls to the US. Another reports, They may ask

you, I bought a [product] and I should get support f rom an

American, why should I get support from an Indian?. Indians

are required to maintain silence in the face of negative con-

structions of their nation. One young woman reports: Many

of the customers when they call, and you say the welcome


7/8

SPECIAL ARTICLE


phrase, they just ask one single [question] am I calling In-

dia? If you say yes, they just ask I want to talk to someone

in the US, I dont want to talk to Indians, and at that point of

time, we have to tolerate and we cannot say anything because

it is our job responsibility as well as it comes under our cus-

tomer satisfaction parameters. A recent recruit summarises

customers perspectives: UK customers and USA customers,

they really did not want to speak to Indians. Obviously being

an Indian... we had to put [up with it]... We have to give good

service for the customer. Indians are required to suspend their

own national pride as part of their jobs:

If the customers is irritated, he is abusing a lot, more than a limit, its

something of course we cannot take as personal. To some extent we

get really upset. If somebody is telling about you and your country,

definitely you cant take those but you have to managewe have to

manageif you don't manage you will lose your job. You have to man-

age. Consistently you have to perform.

Customers are well aware of their power both because of

their location in the west and their role as service receivers;

these hierarchies are enacted on a daily basis on calls. Oneworker reports, They would be like Indian people, cheap peo-

ple. Working for less than what we earn in a day. Another re-

ports that, sometimes they say, Ill sue you. Ill come to India

and Ill complain against you. Ill complain to your supervisor.

Ill complain to your operations manager. So sometimes, even if

youre giving the right information, youre trying to apologise,

youre trying your level best... the aggression wont come out.

Indian call centre workers are also continually accused of

personally stealing American jobs. One man discusses the

negative response he received to a difficult and successful

resolution of a computer problem

Americans are not really happy outsourcing the job to India. Because

I still remember a call from a very old guy, and after doing all the

things possible to satisfy his needs, he made one statement, You know

V you did a great job, however, I hate you as I hate, because I hate all

Indians. And my son is unemployed because of you, because the jobs

are being outsourced to India.

Another worker shares her experience with a customer who

called for no business-related reason: she used to work in a

call centre. She just called up just to say that you people are

just so scripted and I hate you people and I hate you Indians

just because of that. Ahmed characterises hate as a passion-

ate attachment closely tied to love as in love for nation (2004:

43). Hate as an affective economy sticks figures of hate to-

gether, transforming them into a common threat...the bodies

of others are hence transformed into the hated through a dis-

course of pain. They are assumed to cause injury to the ordi-

nary white subject (Ahmed 2004: 15, 43). Indeed, Indian cus-

tomer service agents often report being shocked at the level of

passion and aggression which customers express. Western cus-

tomers anger serves not only to register their objections to

offshoring but also as expressions of their passion and love for

their own nation.

Appadurai (2006) explores a similar dynamic in his study

of the productive nature of violent conflict. He notes that

with the spread of globalisation, expansion of free trade,

transnationalisation of work and universalisation of human

rights, there has been a corresponding growth of ethnic

cleansing and political violence. He argues that there is a link

between violence and community building whereby those in

power experience a surplus of rage against minorities, even

those who may be small in number or hold little power. Global

trends such as the physical migration of people, but also the

virtual migration of work (Aneesh 2006: 44) gives rise to a

deep anxiety about the national project and its own ambigu-

ous relationship to globalization. And globalization, being a

force without a face, cannot be the object of ethnocide. But

minorities can. Accordingly, like minorities, customer service

agents are the target of racial hatred, which serves both to

build community in the west and clearly mark Indians as the

collective stranger who are the flash point for a series of

uncertainties that mediate between everyday life and its

global backdrop (Appadurai 2006: 45, 44). Appadurais analy-

sis explains how customers, who are most likely aware that it is

not the workers on the line who have made the decisions which

have led to the offshoring of work or the loss of their jobs, stillhold workers responsible for these trends. He notes, part of

the effort to slow down the whirl of the global and its seeming

largeness of reach is by holding it still, and making it small, in

the body of the violated minor (ibid: 47). Expression of anger

against customer service agents is one of few publicly accessi-

ble forums for individuals in the west to express displeasure

with corporate actions such as offshoring, or state inaction on

the growing precariousness in the local economy.

Workers are required to appease or accept racist comments as

part of their work and are closely monitored and easily identi-

fied through telephone and computer technologies. In fact, their

words are more closely and easily monitored than those of other

workers in face-to-face service settings. In general, call centreworkers are aware of the fact that they can be easily traced by

customers, and that supervisors frequently listen to their calls.

For customers calling in, there is little accountability because

their responses remain largely anonymous and free from the

normative requirements of public interactions as they are often

calling from the privacy of their homes. They express the anger

they feel when confronted by the prospect of their nation under

attack, much in line with the passionate speeches on the issue in

the public and private forums where offshoring is debated.

Conclusions

Offshoring debates often provoke anger amongst electorate

who, in the absence of international anti-harassment legisla-

tion, vent their anger accordingly. This anger serves to protect

their nation, and the jobs which are its citizens assumed to

be under attack. Customer service workers in India provide

the forum where this everyday expression of nation-building

can occur. Workers hired to provide information sell products,

and help with banking or technical support for computers find

that they are also targets of violent, abusive and explicitly

racist attacks on a daily basis.

While there has been a general recognition of the negative

effects of customer anger on workers health and well-being,


8/8

SPECIAL ARTICLE


dealing with this anger has been constructed as part of service

workers jobs. Dismissed as a normal part of their jobs, the

productive nature of anger is masked. Organisations, politi-

cians and public officials are absolved of their role in the gen-

eration and sanctioning of this anger. Despite the existence of

anti-harassment legislation in many western countries, trans-

national service workers have little protection from aggressive

or violent customers during telephone-based interactions.

If debates on offshoring generate anger amongst the west-

ern public, which in turn leads to violent and racist expres-

sions of national pride during customer service interactions,

this raises the question should offshoring not be debated?

The analysis in this article suggests instead that it is important

to analyse the generative nature of public discussions. While

every exercise of nationalism necessitates the demonisation of

that which is defined as outside the nation, there are sanc-

tions which prevent the systemic exercise of harm of members

of one nation towards those in another in international law.

No such international labour law exists to protect workers

from customer harassment in transnational call centres

which is much needed in light of the productive nature of the

debates on offshoring in western nations.

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