24 ‘Across the great divide’: local and global trade union responses to call centre offshoring to India Phil Taylor and Peter Bain Introduction The last decade has seen a massive expansion in the offshoring of business services from the so-called ...

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the first wave of call centre offshoring from the UK to India (2002–04). Trade union responses in five case‐study companies are documented. Drawing upon theories of union power resources, including international action, the relative efficacy of these union responses is analysed.

The offshoring of business processes from the global North to low-cost countries of the global South has grown spectacularly in the current decade. Self-evidently, transnational relocation presents considerable challenges for organised labour since it suggests both a 'race to the bottom' in respect of pay, conditions and workers' rights and wholesale redundancies in the developed economies. This paper examines the specific case of the migration of call centres from the UK to India and trade union responses in both geographies. Informed by theoretical developments, insights and evidence from diverse disciplines and literatures, the authors concur particularly with Herod's conviction that union strategies to counter TNCs should not be counterposed between 'organising globally' and 'organising locally'and that 'organising at both scales simultaneously may best serve their goals'. Following reflection upon the nature of the call centre and consideration of important contradictions in the offshoring process, we present evidence of UK union responses ranging from the nationalistic, even xenophobic, to the internationalsist, and conclude that membership mobilisation on a principled basis has been key to the limited successes unions have achieved. The paper also evaluates developments in India and the emergence of an embryonic organisation UNITES which is attempting to organise its call centre and business process outsourcing (BPO) workforce. We conclude by considering the gap between the potential and the reality of effective internationally co-ordinated union activity.

As previous chapters demonstrate, much contemporary management rhetoric is geared toward engaging the commitment of employees, exhorting them to co-operate with management demands to extend and flex working hours, to require availability to customers through call-outs, evening and weekend working and to take work home to meet required schedules.KeywordsTeam LeaderCall CentreDomestic DemandCommunity LifeSoftware WorkerThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

In recent times, a new orthodoxy has become established, claiming simultaneously to describe, explain and indeed shape contemporary economy and society. Concepts associated with the knowledge economy now permeate academic, populist, policy maker and practitioner thinking, to such an extent that they have become axiomatic nostrums informing government agendas (e.g. DTI, 1998; 2004a, b). Accordingly, it is widely accepted that we are living through a new and distinctive epoch, in which the dominant principles organizing human society have changed fundamentally and dramatically. Yet, the 'big picture franchise' (Thompson, 2003) of the knowledge economy is but the latest in a succession of paradigm break theories proclaiming the end of industrialism and Fordism, meta-characterizations themselves fraught with definitional and conceptual difficulties (Williams et al., 1987). Since the 1980s, post-Fordism, post-modernism and the surveillance society have been advanced as models, each successively claiming to provide the indispensable framework for understanding socio-economic phenomena of all kinds.KeywordsLabour MarketCall CentreWork OrganizationWork EthicWork CentralityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

This book analyzes the multiple levels of meaning which people attach to work today, and the role of work in people's lives. By looking at call centres and software development, the book evaluates som

The point of departure is the welcome contribution to Work, Employment and Society by Miriam Glucksmann (2004) to the call centre debate. The principal contention of Call Configurations is that the existing literature has provided only limited conceptualization. For, she argues, despite the 'wealth of empirical data detailing the inner workings of call centres, managerial strategies and labour process … and their conditions of employment', providing 'material for debates about surveillance and resistance, work degradation and the relevance of the electronic panopticon', a 'shift of prism' is required. Through an analytical framework focusing on 'process', 'relationality' and 'division of labour', Glucksmann's intention is to situate call centres within a broader economic sociology and overcome the widespread tendency to treat them as 'selfstanding sites of work'. In so doing, she utilizes her 'total social organization of labour' (TSOL) perspective, developed fully in her historical study of women workers (2000). Applied to call centres, TSOL 'is broadened from a focus on work and labour to a wider concern with the various parts or phases of the process in which that labour is conducted' (2004: 798). This means considering call centres as intermediaries within the 'overall configuration of production/distribution/exchange/ consumption' and provides the means for understanding the differing forms and roles they take at the levels of organization and labour. Operators no longer appear as 'homogenous or self-contained' because of identifiable variability in call operating and the linkages to occupations 'presupposed' by the call.

This chapter examines whether the influential analyses of the changing patterns of social class and perceptions of class identity amongst employees, symbolized by the ‘death of the working class’ thesis, are verified in our two leading new economy sectors, namely, software and call centres. These analyses concern the assumed disintegration of Marxist-inspired class analysis, the fragmentation of class structure and their replacement by other organizing criteria of social groups, such as voluntarily chosen identities. The claimed emergence of the information or network society has added a further dimension to the extant sociological debates concerning the existence and basis of class.KeywordsMiddle ClassTeam LeaderCall CentreUnion MembershipClass IdentityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Chapter examines the effects of market turbulence and organisational flux on call centre work.