Britain should export unions as well as jobs: Conditions don''t always fit the public image when UK call center jobs go to India, as trade union activist Michael Cooke discovered on a recent trip
Michael Cooke, The Guardian - UK
Apr. 2, 2005

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Gagan Sameer shakes his head slowly as he recalls the moment he realized he couldn''t take any more.

The crunch came last July towards the end of another all-night shift at one of Delhi's giant call centers.

"I pleaded with my line manager: ''I have literally put in all my energy, without food and water for the past seven hours, and all I am seeking is a 10-15 minute break to allow myself to finish the shift''.

"To which she said, 'see what happens now'' and called the call center’s process manager on his cell phone. She told him in front of me ''Gagan Sameer is refusing to take calls''."

Two months later, he was sacked. Today he is out of work, minus his car and with a career in tatters. But, he says, he simply had no choice.

Before he was sacked in September after protesting about working conditions, the 28-year-old graduate was an experienced technical consultant at leading Indian outsourcer Wipro Spectramind, part of a 35-strong team troubleshooting IT problems for employees at a large US investment company.

Wipro refuses to discuss the details of individual company processes. A company spokesperson said Gagan Sameer was asked to leave the company for "compromising company integrity". He also said Mr Sameer failed to take his grievances through the company ombudsperson.

Parent company Wipro Technologies is fast becoming a major global IT player. It is unlikely to ever be a household name in the UK, but it is proving popular with major British companies, such as Prudential, Friends Provident and Thames Water which use its offshore software development. This Bangalore-based operation accounted for three-quarters of Wipro Technologies'' $1bn revenue in 2004.

Prudential says it has always found the company to be consistently professional. Friends Provident and Thames Water declined to comment.

But Mr Sameer's experience is as much part of the Indian call centre scene as the glowing faces seen in Jobs & Money earlier this year when we told the stories of two young British graduates who swapped their jobs here for what they said were rewarding and lucrative jobs in Indian call centres.

Like many other call centre and back office processing centres, Wipro's Spectramind Indian division is growing quickly. It alone has a workforce of 14,000, part of an industry which barely existed a decade ago and yet which now employs more than 300,000 across India - and is growing by 50% a year.

However, its call centre in Delhi's Okhla industrial park is far from the gleaming towers of some rivals. I saw some 2,000 people work in the squat, whitewashed, dusty building.

Inside, ceilings are low and there is little natural light. Space feels cramped and the atmosphere stale and heavy. Signs on the wall warn staff that loss of their ID tag will cost them the equivalent of half a day's pay. On my visit, groups of tired-looking agents were being debriefed by team leaders in "huddles" which follow every nine and a half hour shift. There were few smiles.

Mr Sameer's nine months at Wipro went wrong right from the outset. He says he was told he would earn more than at his job with rival outsourcer vCustomer - although the big bucks never materialised. But it wasn''t just lack of breaks or pay.

Mr Sameer and his colleague Rohit Kharbanda (not his real name) say they experienced a series of problems from phone rage, enforced, unpaid overtime, to constant pressure and bullying. They say they were not the only ones.

Mr Sameer explains how the shifts would "stretch": "After nine and a half hours I was about to finish my last call and [a project manager] would come over and say ''child, you have to extend for two more hours''. And he is gone. I have no time to react. And you do not have a choice."

According to Mr Sameer, there were several ways to increase the pace of work - many of which sound similar to problems faced by UK call centre workers when the industry was in its infancy in the 90s. One was cutting the amount of down time be tween calls. "Officially, [the gap] is one minute, but as soon as I dropped the last call the ring would begin. It is not in my hands, it is the system." We asked Wipro to comment, but it refused to comment on "internal processes".

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