Calling Bangalore

At work the other day I had to call Circuit City to track down a shipment to one of the schools I buy products for. I heard a click followed by an echo and then a female voice with a thick Indian accent came on the line. She was exceedingly polite and slowly repeated everything I said back to me.

Welcome, I thought, to the wonderful world of global outsourcing. Circuit City, like a growing number of American companies, uses call centers in India to field customer inquiries. The first thing I wondered was what the Indian woman was being paid for her labors. I heard a jumble of voices in the background and imagined this huge room crammed with desks and telephones, all of them occupied by Indian workers happy to answer calls from American consumers.

Then anger set in. Why wasn’t an American worker answering my call?

Because American workers are too expensive, so the jobs go overseas, to places like India. For Indian workers, the jobs provided by Circuit City, Hewlett-Packard and GE Capital represent a step up the economic ladder.

I had a vision of American workers on an escalator going down while Indian workers rode one up.

This is the age of Wal-Mart jobs: low wage, without benefits or pension, and of course, non-union. In this age, it’s every worker for himself or herself.

Long after I hung up, I thought about this call, about American working people, about how far the pendulum has swung in favor of Capital. We don’t hear it put that way very often, Capital vs. Labor, but isn’t that what has really happened over the past thirty-five years? Capital is in the ascendancy and Labor is reeling and any balance that once existed between the two is long dead.

During the Presidential election I heard pundits on all the major networks refer to “Big Labor” and I wondered what they were talking about. How can it be called Big Labor when only a tiny fraction of American workers are unionized? When twenty-two states have right-to-work laws? And when the last bastion of unionized workers – the public sector – is under assault?

I should disclose my bias – I am a unionized public employee. In California, we are known as a “special interest.” According to the rhetoric coming out of our Governor’s office, we are a drain on the state coffers and one cause of the massive state budget deficit. We’re not as productive, or so myth has it, as our private sector peers; our pensions are too generous, our health benefits too expensive, our paid holidays too many. We gum up the works and stand in the way of needed reforms. Eliminate us by outsourcing our jobs to the private sector and all will be well. Our children will excel in school and government offices will hum like, well, your local Home Depot.

Right.

It’s as if having a job with a decent wage, a traditional pension plan and employer-paid health insurance is a crime against the emerging “Ownership Society.”

I suppose I’m out of step with the zeitgeist because I take pride in being a public servant, pride in working in public education, pride in doing my part to provide the infrastructure so that teachers can teach and students learn. Every day I try to give the taxpayers value; I know who pays my salary. I believe the overwhelming majority of my peers and colleagues feel the same way.

There’s a hoary myth that unionized workers do just enough to get by, and use their contracts and grievance procedures to avoid work. I believe the opposite is true. I believe that because union membership gives me a greater stake in my workplace, I have an explicit responsibility to do more, not less; to bring credit to myself and my union.

The balance of power in this country is dangerously out of whack. Ignoring the imbalance is a grave mistake.