by Misato Okumura

There are a lot of call centers in India and many Indians are educated to speak in an American accent to talk with their clients in the United States. The call center itself belongs to IT companies in the United States but it is placed in India and Indian workers there are educated to have an American accent and playing a role of customer service as company members. This is because it is cheaper to employ Indians than employ Americans. Indian employees are well educated and they usually have IT and programming skills but they have struggled with getting job though they graduated from good school. So this sounds very nice because this creates a job in developing country.  But this causes a lot of problems. You can find problems both in India and the United States.

First, problems in India are about their identity and career. Customers call the company and expect that they are going to talk with an American worker. So first thing to do for their job is learning American accent, speed of talking and expressions. Also they need to learn American culture to pretend to be American workers. They check local weather and news in the States on the internet and talk with customers there as if they were also there. They are forced to keep themselves surrounded by American culture and to make themselves think they are not Indians but Americans. So they kill their own identities to get money. This is not good but they need to do that because otherwise they can’t get money. IT companies take advantage of it because they know India have a lot of young people who have knowledge of IT are having hard time to find a job and they can hire them for very cheap. If they work for 7 hours a day, they need to be Americans for one-thirds of a day. It might make them confused.

Second, these Indian workers are doing the same thing every day. It’s just pretending and talking and it doesn’t require any professional skills. This keeps them from a professional and good job even though they graduated from good schools. And you must not forget that there are problems in the United States, too. Because they started outsourcing, a lot of Americans have lost their jobs and opportunity to get a job in their country. The last two problems about career in both countries bring inequality to our society. Japan also has this problem. We don’t have enough job spots for Japanese today but Japanese companies build their factory outside of Japan because it is cheaper. Some people say we are creating job in developing countries but we must not forget this also creates inequality.