BPO workers of the world unite
7 August 2008 Pete Swabey
India's business process outsourcing industry at last gets its own - technology-driven - trade union
The Indian business-process outsourcing sector has absorbed many business practices of Western origin, and made them its own
Indeed, the ease with which Indian BPO firms can adopt – and adapt – techniques developed by US and European companies has helped drive explosive growth in that industry.
But trade unionism is one area of Western business life which the Indian BPO sector has not replicated. One reason is that the intense competition for talent means that workers are, by-and-large, treated well on an individual basis.
However, the downturn in Western economies has started to impact BPO businesses, in some cases triggering redundancies. Reacting to that vulnerability, some workers have decided now is the time for collective representation, and have launched BPO Union.
“The Indian BPO worker needs a collective forum to air his or her concerns and issues,” the man behind BPO Union, simply known only as ‘Chief’, told Information Age. “You will be surprised how workers are being laid off. It not just the money; they are also being deprived of their dignity.”
And, demonstrating India’s latent potential as a source of innovation, the initiative has put a fresh spin on the age-old idea of a trade union.
BPO Union is, according to its founder, a ‘virtual union’. It plans to exert its influence not through strike action or by negotiating pay and conditions with employers. Instead, it aims to deal directly with the shareholders of companies that it feels are mistreating workers, thereby potentially hitting those companies where it hurts most – their share value.
Unfortunate, then, that the first company to attract BPO Union’s ire, IT services company Keane, which laid 400 workers in India off in June 2008, is privately held. (The US company was taken off the stock market as a result of a private-equity buy-out in early 2007.)
But BPO Union’s greatest impact might be to make the Indian BPO industry more amenable to the idea of trade unionism. And that could have far-reaching ramifications. The absence of trade unions offshore has undermined unions on home shores: the leverage that workers used to have over their employers was weakened once those employers had the option of simply sending work offshore.
Further reading
Infosys - The human pyramid
The Indian IT pioneer is grappling with the challenge of changing from service provider to an innovative business partner
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