A number of large corporations are opening call centres in India. This is big business for the world's second most populated country. More and more multinationals are closing call centres in North America and replacing them with lower paid Indian employees. Dell has over 2,000 people working at its customer support centres in Bangalore and Hyderabad alone. I don't think Bangalore and Hyderabad are Texas suburbs.
I understand free-market capitalism and all that jazz, but moving mass quantities of call centre jobs to another continent really irks me. A call centre position is one of the few jobs a student or person without a degree can secure that makes a half-decent dollar without breaking your back or getting really, really dirty. You get to work in a nice clean office in a cubicle of your very own with a computer. You learn valuable computer basics, how to multi-task and problem solving skills and not just when to flip the hamburger and how to clean the shake machine. With many call centres becoming 24 hour operations, there is shift work which enables students to work their way through school and parents to parent when such duties conflict with the 9 to 5 jive. It would be tragic to see these positions leave en masse to another country simply because their wages are less. I'd prefer the strange accent on the other line belong to Pierre in Quebec or Joey in Nova Scotia.
