It is just a matter of time before most exploited BPO workers of India joins Union as Western economies falter
Sans Solavo
Sep. 26, 2005

Indian BPO workers believe they earn enough not to join the Union. It is also prestigious in India to be able to say I an part of management and I do not belong to any Union. As Western economies falter due to stagflation, American and European companies cannot pay what they are paying now, Indian BPO workers will join the unions. The work hours of these BPO workers are enormous. The India oligarchs exploit them. The Western companies get their service for pennies on the dollar.

However fir now the picture is different. From Europe and North America, India's offshore workers, call centre operators, data entry clerks and telemarketers, may seem like the sweatshop labourers of the information age, toiling long hours for meagre pay. An international alliance of unions that wants to organise them is finding a very different reality in India: many think of themselves as members of a relatively well-paid, respected professional elite in no need of a union's protection. "I know these young people have a negative image about unions," says Narayan Ram Hegde of Union Network International, a global alliance of 900 unions. But "these professionals are more like feel cyber coolies," he said. "We hope we will be able to convince them over time." But "these professionals are more like cyber coolies," he said. "We hope we will be able to convince them over time." Hegde is leading the UNI drive to unionise workers in India's back-office outsourcing industry a sector that employs about 350,000 people and is expected to add 80,000 jobs this year. UNI has been quietly setting up the union for the past year its formal launch date was Sept. 18. But it has so far only managed to attract about 500 recruits, underscoring workers'''' hostility to unions and the enormity of the task faced by organizers. "A union would make sense if there was no job security," said K V Sudhakar, who does technical support work in IBM's offshore outsourcing center in the western city of Pune. "Here jobs are more, people are less companies are trying all means possible to keep employees happy so that they won''''t leave." It's not the first time UNI has encountered such sentiments. A previous effort to start a union for Indian software programmers the highly skilled elite of the business flopped in 2000 after the programmers balked at joining, offering similar reasons.

It is just a matter of time before most exploited BPO workers of India joins Union as Western economies falter
Sans Solavo
As Western economies falter due to stagflation, American and European companies cannot pay what they are paying now, Indian BPO workers will join the unions.
READ MORE>>

Microsoft expanding fast in India outsourcing– to double employees in India by 2006
Babu Ghanta
The world’s largest software company plans to double its staff strength at its Indian centres in Hyderabad and Bangalore by March 2006
READ MORE>>

India’s biggest mistake of millennium - India’s PM focuses on second wave of development in service sector and rapid industrialization
Kiran Chaube
It is a mistake. The biggest mistake of the millennium for which many generations of Indians will pay for it.
READ MORE>>

MORE ARTICLES >>