The BBC News website has a piece, today, about hostility experienced by Indian call centre staff dealing with western customers. While interesting, the piece seems unusually "fluff" or human interest for the BBC's news page, packed with unquestioned opinions, and with no interest shown in inquiring into the motivations of either the customers involved, nor the interviewees.
As is obligatory, let me state for the record that anyone using the quote in the piece that "Indians are dirty and that they don't have brains and they are illiterates" is in the wrong, no matter what their motivations.
But look at the story. Remove the racy and racist ineterpretation. It says "people are being rude to call centre staff." Twenty percent is the suspiciously round number. Well, fan my face and pass me a glass of water, I think I am on the edge of fainting.
Tony Benn stated a rule which deserves wider currency: he said that, if you want to know if something is worthy of being a news story, try reversing its meaning and see if that is not a bigger news story. In this case "customers universally polite to Indian call centre staff" would be a big story for the business community.
The fact is that people hate call centres. They loathe being called by their staff just as they sit down to dinner. And a very large proportion of people are calling call centres because something is wrong, and are therefore entering the conversation frustrated in the first place. For somebody who has not been exposed in their upbringing to a variety of accents - and not all those calling these centres is a cosmopolitan world-traveller - understanding somebody from Mumbai can be a genuinely difficult task.
I, myself, if called by a call centre employee of any nationality, will make the experience unplasant for them. Thay have taken a job which involves invading my privacy and I make no apologies for using consumer-guerilla tactics to make their job correspondingly unenjoyable. This will make it harder to get staff, which will raise the cost of the business model and eventually lead to less spam-calling. And yes, I am on the "don't call" list, so I am talking about unethical companies here.
And when it comes to Indian staff, while I would never hurl racial epithets in their direction, I do resent the need to spell my name in full, my address in its entirety (including street and town, and Edinburgh is not an obscure village), and so on. Is this unreasonable? Their English is a thousand times better than my Urdu, for instance, but I'm not holding myself out as potential call centre staff.
And this is natural. It is recognised by the provision of "local" staff for premium services. Platinum American Express card services give me a UK call centre. If forced to use the green card number, I am directed to India.
As an economist, I know the law of competitive advantage perfectly well. I know that if we have more productive tasks for our ex-call-centre staff then we should be glad to offload such menial and skill-free tasks to lower-cost countries, so as to focus on higher-value areas where we have an advantage. What did we have an empire for, after all, if not for such advantages? But I rather think that this may fall on deaf ears to a middle-aged woman from a Sunderland housing estate who just saw her job head east. I am firmly in favour of globalisation, and of sharing our wealth by employing those willing to do what we do not wish to do.I will not support protectionist legislation, but I think that some companies will gain customer goodwill by using local call centre staff. This is why Mahal, in the BBC story, cannot complain when a customer politely enquires as to where the call centre is based, then chooses to boycott that company's services by discontinuing the call. That person may be misguided, economically, but politically they are making a rational and understandable choice.
And ask the UK call-centre staff: they get equally rude people calling them, frustrated at getting their cable disconnected and lashing out at them. The insults may not be racist, but they will be targetted as well as the customer can muster. Until we find a better paradigm than sticking a few hundred unhappy employees in a large, air-conditioned, soulless warehouse and giving them scripts, then such abuse will continue.