Indian Workers Resist Unions
Indian Workers Resist Unions
Date: Monday, September 26, 2005 11:29 PM
JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER
by Rob Sanchez
September 26, 2005 No. 1336
I often hear the theory that Indian workers will rebel against their sweatshop working conditions and salaries. Once organized, they will force their salaries to equalize with Americans so it will no longer be advantageous for U.S. companies to offshore jobs. In this scenario, Americans will get their high-paid jobs back once companies realize how much smarter we are and more importantly when there is no cost advantage in moving offshore. It's a theory with a very nice ending.
There is only one thing wrong with that theory: it ain't gonna happen in our lifetimes, if ever. Indian cyber-coolies are no more willing to organize than their counterparts in the U.S. Ironically most of these offshored workers are employed by U.S. owned companies that moved operations to India.
Workers in both countries will continue to refuse to unionize as long as they think they are getting paid more than the blue-collar workers they so despise. That's very good news for employers who want to pit the low-cost labor in India against the much more expensive labor in the U.S.
The most common argument I hear from high-tech workers is that they don't need to unionize because they are professionals (there are many other stupid reasons that are too numerous to list). Indian workers say almost the same thing in regards to unions:
But an international alliance of unions that wants to
organize them is finding a very different reality in
India: Many workers think of themselves as members of
a relatively well-paid, respected professional elite
in no need of a union's protection.
The LA Times article below about unions in India is appearing in newspapers all over the nation. It's amazing how much faster news gets around when it's something that coporate management wants to hear. I included a very clever commentary from a website with a name that would be spam filtered if I spelled it. There is an even more clever commentary that follows which will probably offend just about every programmer and/or engineer on this mailing list. (In case you are wondering why I think the commentary is so good it's because I wrote it about a year ago! Out of a sense of humility I put it as the last article :-)
Steve Tizsa of CWA Local 4250 visited India and has some interesting insights on what's going on there from the perspective of unions. To read a couple of articles about his trip, go to this link:
http://cwa-union.org/news/CWANewsDisplay.asp?ID=1622
On June 16, 2005, Steve Tizsa was interviewed by talk-show host Ed "Flash" Ferenc to discuss his recent trip to India. Download MP3 file to listen to interview. Use either of the two links below.
http://www.cwalocal4250.org/outsourcing/binarydata/Steve%20Tizsa%20Edited%20Version.mp3
OR
http://makeashorterlink.com/?I18724EDB
Articles include in this newsletter
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-indiaunion24sep24,1,2803246.story?coll=la-headlines-business
Indian Workers Resist Unions
http://www.corporatemofo.com/stories/030119union.htm
Why Don't Programmers Unionize?
by Tristan Trout
http://www.structuralist.net/wp_professional/index.php?p=11
Professional Class Wars
by Rob Sanchez
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http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-indiaunion24sep24,1,2803246.story?coll=la-headlines-business
Indian Workers Resist Unions
Employees in the outsourcing industry toil long hours but balk at organizing efforts.
From Associated Press
September 24, 2005
BANGALORE, India -- From Europe and North America, India's offshore workers -- call center operators, data entry clerks and telemarketers -- may seem like the sweatshop laborers of the information age, toiling long hours for meager pay.
But an international alliance of unions that wants to organize them is finding a very different reality in India: Many workers 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 cyber-coolies," he said. "We hope we will be able to convince them over time."
Hegde is leading the drive to unionize workers in India's back-office outsourcing industry -- a sector that employs about 350,000 and is expected to add 80,000 jobs this year.
Union Network International has been quietly setting up the union for the last year -- its formal launch date was Sunday. But it has so far managed to attract only about 500 recruits, underscoring workers' hostility to unions and the difficulty of the task organizers face.
"A union would make sense if there was no job security," said K.V. Sudhakar, who does technical support work in IBM Corp.'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 the union 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.
A comparable situation is playing out in the U.S. where, with manufacturing jobs disappearing, many union leaders say they must organize high-tech workers and academics to survive. But the Communications Workers of America union has had a tough job trying to organize white-collar workers at companies such as IBM and Microsoft Corp.
Global companies have increasingly farmed out any task that can be done over a computer network to low-wage countries. India is the undisputed king of the business with 44% of the global market and an industry that earned revenue of $17.2 billion in 2004.
For Union Network International, the organizing drive is crucial because jobs outsourced to India cut into the unions' traditional pool of members in Europe and North America.
"We lose members [in the West] because of outsourcing," Hedge says. Setting up new ones in India "will help us have the same negotiating power."
He says the new union can help the industry's workers win better conditions. The work can be monotonous and grinding -- fielding calls from irate Americans whose computers are crashing; spending eight hours plugging numbers into a Dutch bank's database; deciphering hundreds of X-rays of sick Europeans in a single shift.
Burnout is common, and 3 out of every 10 workers change jobs each year. Hard figures are difficult to come by, but industry experts say that stress forces 1 in 7 workers to leave the industry every year.
Among those who decided to join the union is Raghavan Iyengar, a call center supervisor in Bangalore. He said companies gave incentives for those who worked extra time, and young workers ignored health problems, such as insomnia and back pain, to earn those extra bucks.
"The industry's motto is 'Shut your mouth and take your money,' " Iyengar said. "We want to change that."
But money can be a powerful lure in India, where per capita income hovers around $500 a year and most people make much less toiling in dusty fields or on steaming city streets.
Call center rookies, in contrast, make about $2,400 a year -- about twice the pay of first-year teachers, accountants or lawyers -- and work in air-conditioned offices, many of which have health clubs and well-stocked cafeterias. With experience, the salaries multiply.
The easy money is on display every Friday evening in Bangalore, the industry's center, where young workers unwind after a week of work in the posh clubs and restaurants that have grown with the outsourcing business.
As for complaints about working conditions, Ruchinder Singh, who works in the southern city of Hyderabad for GE Capital International, said he could take them straight to his company's chief executive.
"When my CEO will listen to what I have to say, then why do I need a union?" asked Singh, who helps customers around the world use specialized software programs.
"We have a structure in place where the management is constantly in touch with teams and responds within 24 hours to any complaint," he said. "We are not factory workers, we are knowledge professionals -- every employee is treated as an asset in this industry."
Back-office workers are typically college graduates in their 20s and early 30s and drawn from India's urban middle and upper classes. Their parents are lawyers, doctors and small- and large-business owners.
Such a background does not make them fertile recruits for union organizers, said H.S. Sudarshan, a former call center worker and now a recruitment consultant.
Faced with problems, Sudarshan said, many just quit and take a better job.
"There is opportunity everywhere," he said. "A new job is a better solution than union."
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http://www.corporatemofo.com/stories/030119union.htm
Why Don't Programmers
Unionize?
by
Tristan Trout
My friend Sara (whose name I've change to protect her slim chances of getting a new job) worked in the IT department of a large American corporation, keeping their Web site updated. Every so often, a new "project" would come down the pipe from the ignoramuses in Management, sparkling with the latest buzzword that some overpaid consultant had taught them. "Give us more interactivity," they would say. "Make browsing our site an above-the-fold experience. Give it hyperlinks."
After figuring out what the geniuses with the expensive degrees wanted, to get these projects done, Sara would often have to work until 8 or 9 o'clock at night, eating dinner out of Chinese take-out containers and neglecting her cat, her boyfriend, and her yoga class. More than half the time, the project was cancelled anyway, leaving Sara with nothing to show for her efforts but an ever-increasing roll of fat around her gut, cat piss on her bed, burnt-out batteries in her Hitachi Magic Wand, and some stale egg foo young in the fridge. It wasn't like they were paying her anything, either -- she was kept on a contract that came up for renewal every six months, with no overtime, no retirement plan, no chance for promotion, and just enough money to pay the rent on her half of a tiny New York City apartment. Finally, late last fall, the company decided that it would be cheaper to "outsource," and laid off her entire department. She's now without health insurance and owes her dentist $500 she doesn't have for an emergency wisdom-tooth extraction.
Gone are the glory days of venture capital-funded bagels and massages at your desk. When the dot-com bubble burst like a fart in a bathtub, the code monkey became today's assembly line worker. The parallels are obvious: Both never wear shirts with collars if they can help it. Both are ultimately responsible for producing the finished product, and both possess a unique skillset that is necessary for getting the job done. Just as you can't make cars without guys with welding torches, you can't make video games or Web sites or financial software without someone who knows the difference between a C++ compiler and Minesweeper.
Most importantly, both blue-collar workers and no-collar workers are the first to get the shaft. No programmer, however 31337, is going to be promoted even to middle management, with all the benefits -- such as getting paid a decent wage -- that this entails. Gone are the days when a CS degree meant $60,000 a year right out of college. Most of the time, keyboard jockeys are lucky to keep their jobs, since, in today's rather crappy economy, they're often the first ones laid off, and the only people who get severance packages any more are the execs they catch embezzling. The math is simple: If your workers aren't paid extra for overtime, it's cheaper to pay one person to do the job of three, and if you can keep them as "consultants" and avoid even the health benefits, so much the better. After all, the more you short your workers, the bigger your golden parachute. Apparently, Management doesn't understand that there are only so many hours in a day in which one person can fix the server, update the database, and once again remind Bernice The Aged Administrative Assistant who has been working for the firm since the Eisenhower administration how to print out her boss' e-mail.
So, what we have is a rather large group of people whose skills are absolutely indispensable to keeping the economy going, but who are getting continually exploited and pushed around by the same smarmy kids who used to flush their heads in the toilet after high school gym class, albeit now wearing Armani instead of letter jackets. And, thus far, no one's done anything about it except gripe on F...cdCompany and cry into their beer.
A while ago, we asked the question, "Why don't office workers unionize?" The answer, of course, is that by going to college for four (or five, or six) years and working with your brains, instead of your hands, you're supposedly of a "better" class. Unions struggle under the unmerited working-class, blue-collar stigma of being associated with unsavory types like Teamsters and auto plant workers -- even if teachers and police officers also have their unions.
In many ways, programmers and their ilk are victims of their own overeducation. They tend to be Ayn Rand-reading, Heinlein-worshipping, independent, antisocial, and libertarian in their political views. Put three programmers in the same room, and you'll get four opinions on everything from bombing Iraq to statutory rape. Trying to get them to do anything together -- as anyone who's seen the vicious politics around a Star Trek convention or goth club can attest -- is like herding cats.
Yet, prospectively, computer geeks, being well-connected both in the literal and figurative senses of the word, could organize more quickly and more strongly than the United Auto Workers or Garment Workers ever did. There would be a whole lot of benefits, beginning with health care and employment security. In a field where a university degree isn't worth the paper it's printed on and some of the most skilled workers are self-taught, the community itself could ensure that workers had the necessary skills to do a job -- sort of like a guild system for the twenty-first century.
The only hope of improvement in the situation is when IT workers realize that their mutual exploitation gives them common cause, and that any group of people is stronger together than they are independently. Imagine if, one day, if the Local #404 asked every help-desk phone-answerer and javascript debugger in New York or San Francisco or Chicago to call in sick. The city would shut down.
And maybe people like Sara would finally start getting paid what they're worth.
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http://www.structuralist.net/wp_professional/index.php?p=11
Professional Class Wars
by Rob Sanchez
Mr. Sanchez is the webmaster to one of the premier H-1B, Outsourcing websites www.zazona.com. Mr. Sanchez also publishes a periodic newsletter - The H-1B/Job Destruction Newsletter
What follows is Mr Sanchez view on "The failing of (engineering) organizations."
"One of the major failings of organizations like IEEE, AEA, NSPE, PG, NCSEA, ASCE etc. is that they dont understand that there is class warfare in the U.S. Even worse, they seem to think that engineers are somehow part of the management or executive classes, or what we refer to as the ruling elite. Engineers often trick themselves into believing that they can avoid traditional labor conflicts with their employers because they have an illusion that they are members of the executive class.
The tech community needs to understand where they are in the class system before they can understand how to solve their employment problems. Engineers and techies probably are a class above the Joe Six-Packs that earn their living by manual labor but and thats due mainly to their white-collar status and higher salaries - its not because they have decision making authority or because they have control of their fate in the labor market.
I see no hope that these organizations will ever help technical workers until they understand that they arent part of the management or executive classes. In the eyes of executives engineers are nothing but highly paid grunts, and that will never change. Unfortunately most techies have deluded themselves into thinking they are part of the executive class, so perhaps the orgs are just reflecting the delusions of their members.
I dont think technical organizations can get rid of their outdated paradigm. They are stuck in a mind-set that will prevent them from ever helping techies as wage earners. The failure to recognize class conflicts in the U.S., and a the inability to understand what class they represent, will doom these organizations from ever helping techies resolve labor issues such as H-1B, L-1, offshoring, wage depression, unemployment etc.
To make matters worse, most of the officers that run technical organizations and associations are members of the management and executive classes. This creates a cultural divide between those who run the organizations and the members who are typically wage earning engineers. Engineers and techies might not understand what causes this cultural divide but it does make the organizations seem irrelevant to them. Thats one of the reasons its so hard to recruit members.
If a techie organization was created that understood their place in our class system, and convince their members of the same, they could become a leader instead of just another techie club. Of course they would probably not be able to get members because techies arent ready to face reality yet. Its quite a dilemma that I dont know how to resolve until techies reach some kind of consensus that we are of the worker class.
What we really need is an attitude change, but I dont think that will happen anytime soon.
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