Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Working the Night Shift

Stanford University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments...........................................................ix1 Introduction............................................................12 Off-Shoring Customer Service: A New Global Order........................273 Mobility-Morality Narratives............................................484 Traveling at Night......................................................655 Fast Money, Family Survival, and the Consumer Class.....................836 On the Home Front.......................................................1077 Social Mobility: Other Openings and Constrictions.......................1238 Conclusion..............................................................142Postscript................................................................153Appendix..................................................................157Notes.....................................................................159References................................................................175Index.....................................................................189

Chapter One

For many young people, especially women, call-center work means money, independence, and an informal environment where they can wear and say what they like. Along with training in American accents and geography, India's legions of call-center employees are absorbing new ideas about family, material possessions and romance. -Wall Street Journal, 2004

"Housekeepers to the World"-this headline gracing the cover of a 2002 issue of India Today was accompanied by an image of a woman wearing a headset. Other reports that emerged at the same time suggested that these twenty-something "housekeepers" were trading in salwar kameez's and arranged marriage for hip-hugger jeans, dating, and living "the good life." The call center industry, with its relatively high wages and high-tech work environment, was heralded as a source of liberation for women.

A closer look reveals a different aspect of the story. On December 13, 2005, Pratibha Srikanth Murthy, a twenty-four-year-old employee of Hewlett Packard, was raped and murdered en route to her night shift call center position in Bangalore. Reported by the India Times to the BBC and CNN, the Bangalore rape case attracted worldwide attention. Just two years prior, in December 2003, a speaker at the 2003 Women in IT Conference in Chidambaram, India, had reported that one of her employees in Chennai called her company's New York office in a complete panic because the shuttle van used to transport employees during the night had been pulled over by the police. Despite having identity cards, the women were accused of prostitution. Global night shift labor was intersecting with the lives of women in ironic and unsettling ways.

In the late 1990s, Fortune 500 companies in the United States began moving customer service jobs to India because of the availability of an English-speaking population and lower wages than those paid to U.S. workers. Call centers fall under the umbrella of the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry in India. Estimates suggest that approximately 470,000 people work in the industry, and it is currently the fastest growing sector in the nation.

Due to the time difference between India and the United States, one of the primary requirements for employment in a transnational call center-besides fluency in English-is working the night shift. Typical night shift hours range from 10 P.M. to 6 A.M. or 8 P.M. to 4 a.m. Mobility is vitally important to those who seek to work in this industry. In other words, physical mobility (getting to and from work) and temporal mobility (going out when one is expected to stay in) are job requirements. Because leaving home at night is generally considered inappropriate for and off-limits to Indian women, companies offer transportation as part of their recruitment strategy.

In this book I examine how women employed in the industry experience this rapidly expanding "second shift" in the global economy. During the course of research for this book it became evident that call center employment affects the lives of women workers in ways that run counter to standard expectations, such as the belief that when women are educated and earn a relatively high income, their status in a given society will be transformed for the better; and that as part of this transformation women will experience increased levels of independence and empowerment, such as substantive changes in the household (for example, men contributing equally to household labor) and the ability to come and go as they please. This has not necessarily been the case.

Instead, I argue, employment in this industry, particularly working at night, brings with it both new challenges and new opportunities for women workers. The notion of a woman's "place" in the urban nightscape, which until now, for most women, has been characterized as "being safe at home," is transforming as a result of the night shift requirement in the BPO industry. My research for this book was shaped by three broad, interconnected questions related to this transformation: (1) How does the demand for night shift workers recodify women's physical and temporal mobility? (2) How does call center employment translate into social and economic mobility? and (3) What spatial and temporal barriers do women face, both in the household and in urban public space, as a result of BPO employment? In-depth qualitative analysis revealed that the answers to these questions are by no means unified and singular, because of a variety of factors such as age, economic status, and living situation (that is, whether married, single, living alone, living with parents or within a joint family).

For the most part, educated, middle-class women working in call centers are earning an income that far exceeds what they could previously earn. Proponents of the industry believe this serves as a catalyst for empowering women. Yet no one has considered whether increased income and education mean that women experience expanded physical and temporal mobility (that is, are now able to go out, day or night, as freely as their male counterparts). Thus, underlying Working the Night Shift is concern about whether women continue to face strict regimes of surveillance and control of their physical and temporal mobility, despite increased income and education, and what this tells us about power and dominance in a given society.

Spatializing the Night

Social science tends either to ignore space completely, to view it as merely a container of difference, or to conceptualize it as "dead," absolute, or neutral. According to Fincher and Jacobs, this framework is problematic because class and gender differences are "experienced in and through place." Thus geographers are on the forefront of illustrating that space matters, particularly in terms of the social construction of identities.

For instance, Dalits, also called untouchables or the backward caste, were barred from entering Hindu temples because of the low status assigned to them by society. Likewise, in many Hindu temples,...