No sweatshop here

At Webodrome, on the ninth floor of a building in downtown Mumbai, programmers exult in their freedom.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Apr 12, 2004 | When Reena, 24, worked at a customer service call center, she found herself hawking magazines to Americans in the middle of the night -- Americans none too happy to hear from her.

"I had one who said, 'Go back to your own country,' because she thought I was in the U.S.," Reena remembers. "I said, 'Ma'am, I am in my own country."

She quit after eight months.

Her friend, Deepa, 23, worked in a call center for just a few weeks. The verbal abuse from angry customers was too much: "If you had been a god, you could take any shit. But you are a human being. How long can you take it?"

The same monotony that people working the phones in the United States complain about afflicts their counterparts on the other side of the world, too: "In a call center, you can survive just a year or two and not find it boring," says Deepa.

There are other hidden costs to the Indian telemarketer grind. "You work in shifts. When you are awake, your family is sleeping, and when your family is awake, you are sleeping. You have money, but you can't actually enjoy that money," says Reena.

"Say I have spoken to 10 irate customers," adds Dwpa. "I'm definitely going to be in a very bad mood. And that same bad mood, I'm going to take it home. And it's going to come out at my loved ones. So, what's the use of that much money?"

In Mumbai (a city that everyone still calls Bombay) 10,000 to 12,000 rupees a month -- about $230 to $275 U.S. dollars -- is an attractive lure for recent college graduates in this mega-metropolis, home to the glamour and lucre of the Bollywood film industry as well as the largest slums in Asia. To put that sum in context, a freshly minted MBA starting out in an insurance company makes about 14,000 rupees a month.

But despite the big bucks that call centers offer, by the industry's own conservative estimates, annual attrition for such jobs in India is 30 to 40 percent, according to the National Association of Software and Service Companies. Some turnover can be explained by experienced "agents" job-hopping from one firm to another to increase their wages; the sector continues to grow at a rate of more than 20 percent annually.

Today Reena and Deepa are programmers for an I.T. (information technology) services firm called Webodrome. Their office occupies part of a hall on the ninth floor of a 14-story office building in Mumbai's Nairman Point district. A swath of the Arabian Sea is visible from the window of the small meeting room where engineers often eat lunch.

Around 30 people work in Deepa's crowded office, writing code in ASP, Java, VB.Net, PHP and many other technical lingua francas. They spend about nine hours a day coding for American, European and Canadian companies -- projects outsourced to India at costs of about half of what first-world programmers would charge. The starting salary at Webodrome can be as little as half of what the call centers dangle, but Deepa and Reena are here for the promise of a better career -- and more money -- in the longer term.

I came to this small firm because one of its co-founders, Amit Doshi, read a story titled "White-collar Sweatshops" I had written last July. In the story, I had focused on the increasingly angry reactions expressed by American programmers on the topic of the globalization of the tech job market. Doshi bluntly informed me that I understood nothing about what outsourcing means to his employees. He wrote: "First, right off the bat, I take a great deal of offense when you call what I do for a living running a sweatshop."

True, his company's offices look crowded by Western standards, but they don't exude the atmosphere of piecework oppression that rows of women hunched over sewing machines do. The programmers certainly are not complaining -- coming to work, they told me, is an exercise in "total freedom." They have their own ideas about what makes a job good or a bad, what exploitation is, and what's simply beneath their dignity. Phanindra, 24, another Webodrome engineer who is also pursuing an MBA, says he, for one, would never work in a call center: "I'd be a hawker on the roadside before I would do that," he says, drawing laughs from his coder colleagues. "Self-esteem is something you should possess."

Next Page: Two-hour nightmare commutes each way, but an office full of liberation

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