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Insults from America
U.S. customers upset about outsourcing disparage call-center employees in India, poisoning international relations
BY MIKE McPHATE
SPECIAL TO NEWSDAY. Mike McPhate is a freelance writer in New Delhi.

January 11, 2006

NOIDA, India -- Debalina Das, a computer help-line agent in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, punched the button last winter for a call from America.

"You Indian slut," came the man's voice, the 22-year-old recounted, "in some - Third World country, roaming about naked without food and clothes, what do you know about computers? Have you ever seen one ... ? This company is just saving money by outsourcing to Third World countries like yours."

Das, who quit 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."

Such is the sentiment among many workers in India's burgeoning call center industry. While irate calls are a mainstay of customer service work in any country, many here say they regularly face special abuse from Americans, whose tantrums are often spurred by anti-outsourcing opinion and are sometimes racially tinged.

Of the millions of calls patched daily between Indian agents and American customers, roughly 5 percent - or more than 200,000 - involve bigotry, say workers and industry analysts. The vitriol feeds a "searing anger" among employees, said Vinod Shetty, a Bombay-based lawyer who has formed a collective for call center workers. "A lot of trauma is caused."

India and the United States have in recent years enjoyed a budding friendship that leaders often ascribe to the countries' entwining societies.

India 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 past decade American companies have increasingly sought Indian consumers and employees.

Fueling the telephone tirades is outrage over outsourcing, a practice that is predicted to move 3.4 million U.S. service-sector jobs overseas by 2015, according to the consultancy Forrester Research. Most of the work comes to India, where young, low-cost employees handle a range of tasks for Americans - they draw cartoons, interpret heart scans, adjudicate insurance claims, reserve flights and chase debtors.

An anti-outsourcing movement in the United States has drawn wide support as layoffs continue to mount at U.S. companies such as IBM, which is cutting 13,000 jobs in the United States and Europe as it adds 14,000 in India, according to the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers. In the first three months of last year, state legislators proposed 112 bills to curb the practice, according to the National Foundation for American Policy.

Some outsourcing opponents have let their ire for job-slashing chief executives veer toward India. Several contributors to the Internet forum Is Your Job Going Offshore?, for example, depict the Hindu-majority country as depraved: a haven for terrorists and wife-burners, a "giant leech," and a nation of "back-stabbing cowards."

Such commentary has helped shape a perception among India's customer care workers that Americans are intolerant. "Everybody thinks like that," said Samik Chowdhury, assistant manager at an IBM office in northern India. "Every time it's racism only."

That opinion is at odds with most urban Indians, who tend to admire America for its strength and entrepreneurial spirit. In a recent 16-country Pew poll, India returned the highest percentage of citizens with a favorable impression of the United States: 71 percent.

The less favorable view, though, is beginning to seep into Indian popular culture. The pilot scripts for a new sitcom called "The Call Center," slated to air this winter on the leading channel NDTV, depict Westerners as arrogant, immoral and comically rude.

The show's villain, the Indian manager of a call center, is an India-bashing blowhard, a disposition he picked up at an Ivy-league business school in the United States.

One of the episodes recreates a real-life exchange that occurred last January between an American and an Indian agent that has become notorious among the call center crowd here. On a Philadelphia-based radio show, host Troi Terrain telephoned an Indian call center pretending to order hair beads for his daughter and quickly turned vicious.

"Listen to me, you dirty rat eater," growled Terrain to muffled laughter in the studio. " ... You're a filthy rat eater. I'm calling about my American 6-year-old white girl. How dare you outsource my call?"

Indian offices have taken measures to thwart such attacks: agents often adopt anglicized names, undergo "accent neutralization" and U.S. cultural training, and sometimes claim to be located in the United States. Workers are taught to suffer attacks politely and try to calm customers. That failing, many offices offer the option to be transferred to agents in the United States.

These humiliations, say observers, are tolerated by a labor force that savors the opportunity to join India's growing middle class. With monthly incomes of about $200, call center employees enjoy upscale lifestyles in a country where one-third of its citizens are poverty-stricken.

"They feel like it is their duty" to swallow insults, said labor researcher Babu Remesh.

In the northern Indian city of Noida, a group of agents for SBC, the U.S. communications company, sat recently on the clipped grass in front of the silver-glassed office building where they field Americans' Internet connection problems. Callers often dismiss them the moment they detect their Indian accents, they say. "A whole lot of the time people are yelling," said Kapil Chawla, 23. "They just want to talk to an American."

Saurabh Jha, a blue-jeaned 22-year-old, said a Texas woman phoned recently and told him that thanks to outsourcing, "you are getting money, food, shelter. You should be starving."

She berated him for 12 minutes before she allowed him to offer advice that fixed her problem: to unplug her computer and plug it back in. "I was speechless," he said. "She didn't even give me a chance."

Copyright 2006 Newsday Inc.