Evalueserve, a market research company based in India was looking for people with call centre experience and good English/French skills. I found the job advert in a normal German job centre. He has found jobs for 100 workers, and this year expects to place 200 more”. In October 2004, Tim Bond set up Launch Offshore, a London recruitment firm that caters to Indian call centres. Particularly in the UK the number of people who would work in Indian call centres seem big enough to set up agencies for recruiting them: “There's even a new group of service providers to help supply India's outsourcers with hires from overseas. Of course the western media is keen on reporting about these new “labour migrants”, the main German television news broadcast a feature on the “poor academics” who would not find a comparable job in Germany and nearly all bigger European newspapers published articles praising the young pioneers who make use of the new global labour market. Their motivations vary from careerist aims of having a six months job reference from an Indian company in their CV to advent(o)urism and lack of financial resources for a longer trip abroad. Compared to the thousands of relocated jobs only a small amount of students and back-packers make use of the recent employment opportunity in the Indian BPO sector. Although the Indian call centre companies complain about a shortage of labour force, migration from the western world will not solve the alleged problem. We cannot talk of mass labour migration of European or US call centre work force to India. If you want to get in touch with them or get hold of the distributed brochure please write to: Įmployment of foreign work force in Indian call centres The political intervention of distributing reports on working conditions and strikes in European and US call centres to BPO-employees in Gurgaon and Delhi was a collective effort of “Workers Solidarity”, a small non-party group based in Delhi. Politically, the job itself was not too interesting but provided opportunities to talk to a lot of work mates who had been employed in various call centres in the area and to get contacts to people there. The text consists of five main parts:ġ) Short introduction to employment of foreigners in Indian call centresĢ) General description of the company and the workĤ) General situation, workers interviews and leafleting in Gurgaon call centre clusterĥ) Political conclusions and links to other related texts It was written after three months employment as a foreign call centre agent in Gurgaon, a booming satellite town of Delhi, India (see more on Gurgaon: prol-position newsletter no.4 on strike at Honda).

The following report adds some subjective impressions on the matter. From India we received various articles reporting about increasing wages and first labour conflicts within the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) sector. The main emphasis was on the fact that along with call centre work, capital also relocates its contradictions, thereby creating new aspirations within the emerging work force of the target country. In prol-position newsletter no.3 we published a general overview on global relocation of call centre work. The text looks at the composition of foreign workers in Indian call centres and documents interviews with workers from international companies such as HP or Citibank which relocated call centre work to the industrial outskirts of Delhi.

Call center in new delhi