Chapter One - Today's ‘Good Girl’: the Women Behind India's BPO Industry

Summary

‘She is working the hooker shift!’

‘Who will marry her?’

‘What kind of work are these females doing at night?’

‘Call centre job equals call girl job!’

During the course of fieldwork on women's employment in India's burgeoning business process–outsourcing (BPO) industry – more narrowly known as the call centre industry – these comments were part and parcel of what I would hear in response to educated women earning relatively high wages while working the night shift. In the 1990s, Fortune 500 companies in the US started moving jobs such as customer service and technical support, software development and financial services to India because of the availability of an English-speaking population and lower wages than those paid to US workers. Due to the time difference between the US and India, working at night is a key requirement and typical night shift hours range from 10:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. or 8:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. and, in some cases, employees are required to mask their identities with Anglicized names such as Mary, Julie or Stacey. Twenty-five years ago it would have been unheard of for a Texan to dial an 800 number at 2:30 p.m. only to reach the suburb of a major Indian metropolis at 2:00 a.m. India time, where an employee named Jyothi would alter her accent and answer: ‘Good afternoon, American Express, this is Julie speaking.’ But today, this is an everyday occurrence. This transformation of time into a global resource is based on reorganizing employee's identities, neutralizing their accents and temporally adjusting the conventional nine-to-five work schedule.