Photographer : Mojo Denbow's Photo Studio |
You’ve just sat down to dinner—
The phone rings. You put down your fork and pick up the phone.
‘Hello?’
Pause.
You try again. ‘Hello?’
Pause.
Click. Fuzz.
One last time: ‘Hello?’
Finally a distant, accented voice replies—‘Hello, am I speaking to…’
I have international friends calling me all the time. They’re always offering me something new—an investment seminar, a ‘free’ holiday, a new credit card. They always know my name.
To tell you the truth, most of these international friends of mine are Indian. They tend to be well-educated, aged between twenty and thirty, and living in exotic-sounding places like Bangalore, New Delhi and Mumbai.
A little bit more truth—it’s Australian companies who employ these people to ring me up, call me by name and offer me what I didn’t even know I wanted.
And it’s the same Australian companies paying my well-spoken international friends just a fraction of the wage of what Australian call centre workers earn—a mere $100 a week, while their Aussie counterparts are sitting pretty on between $770 and $860 a week.
But surely this is just reality—in India, you’d be glad to have an office to work in, and a reliable pay packet coming your way. So do we care that while every Australian CEO and his dog are pocketing the extra cash, my international friends find themselves on the wrong side of this global shortchange?
In times of doubt and confusion, and when my international friends won’t answer my questions about their socio-economic status, it’s useful to turn to John Howard for a healthy dose of unreality about the whole situation. The PM recently said that “India’s middle class is really about the most significant thing that’s so far come along in the twenty-first century”.
Wow. That’s a big call. And I’m not just saying that because it makes a good pun (although it does). But if we do swallow John’s bitter pill of truth—what are the consequences? If young Indian professionals are earning less than $100 a week, India’s emerging middle class are surely one of the poorest middle classes in the world.
Is it unfair or just realistic to expect India’s middle class to become the telephone warehouse for the middle classes of Australia, the UK and USA?
It’s true that thousands of Australian call centre jobs were moved offshore because thousands of young Australians didn’t want (or need) those jobs. It’s also true that the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has warned that one in five of Australia’s ten million jobs could easily be shifted overseas—if money was the ultimate bottom line. It’s also true that in a finance-driven corporate society, money probably is the bottom line. In the future, young Australians may have to fight Australian companies for these jobs they don’t
really want.
In Australia, a high-school leaver with no experience can get a job at a call centre relatively easily. In India, it’s the domain of intelligent university graduates. Indian call centre workers undertake courses that equip them to deal with the highly complex Australian people who happen to answer the phone—they learn to acquire a neutral English accent, and knowledge of Australian climates and jokes.
The young people of Australia are literally a drop in the ocean of the young people of the world. In India, there are 550 million people under twenty-five years of age. Five hundred and fifty million. That’s a lot of potential call centre workers—and a lot of unfair wages.
How do I know this?
Howard, J 2006,
Address to the Business Luncheon, Diwan-I-Am Room, New Delhi, 6 March,
http://www.pm.gov.au/news/speeches/speech1808.html
Kremmer, C 2006, ‘Jobs for sale in a free-trade world’,
The Sydney Morning Herald, 21 August
McIlveen, L 2006, ‘Where our jobs went—The Indian call centres undercutting our workers’,
The Daily Telegraph, 10 October
