B ENEATH IT
Formations of Industry, Work &
Labour in the Information Technology Sector
Centre For Culture , Media & Governance
Jamia Millia Islamia
New Delhi
B
ENEATHIT
Formations of Industry, Work & Labour in the Information Technology Sector
A Seminar Collaboratively Organised by
Centre for Culture, Media & Governance Centre for Jawaharlal Nehru Studies Jamia Millia Islamia
New Delhi
22nd-23rd February 2007
Seminar Convenor Vibodh Parthasarathi CCMG, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi vibodhp@yahoo.com
C
ONCEPTN
OTEIn their euphoria over IT, mainstream scholarly and promotional writings from India tend to gloss over the fact that technology is simultaneously Economics, Knowledge and Social Structure: Economics, in it being a product as well as the raw material for the creation of informatic forms; Knowledge, in itself and as an instrument for the further generation of knowledge as data, ideology or culture; and Social Structure, as its production and orchestration is defined by class, gender and race, within and beyond the territoriality of the nation state. What in common parlance is referred to as ‘IT’ is representative of an ensemble of varying practices; thus, investigating this landscape forces one to recognise and explore its multiple, structuring dimensions.
A look at the methodological underpinnings of literature on the Information Technology industry indicates scholars having delved into this landscape in two distinct manners. First, by looking at what we see, hear and interpret about practices of work and leisure associated with IT---sometimes in conjunction with understanding the wider world of the producers and consumers of informatic commodities. Secondly, by excavating what we find about the manufacture of and trade in software, hardware and services---often together with how these interact with the wider technological and politico-jural dynamics of the times. The scope of the first, the sphere of human action, evolved from concerns in anthropology, cultural studies and sociology and got honed by how and from where individual scholars came to understand and study these practices. The scope of the second, the sphere of business, stemmed from management studies and the economics of creative industries, tempered by the variety of methodological standpoints and, often consequently, analytical canvas adopted.
This distinction may sound profound but it is a totally (mis)constructed one;
moreover, it is invariably, and repeatedly, presented and accepted as being dichotomous.
This dichotomy, and the conceptual structures underlying them, are neither free floating nor dismembered from the intellectual tools and standpoints that have realised them. Such a misconstrued separation indicates conforming to divisions and divides associated with the university curriculum---i.e. how these fields of inquiry are taught within classrooms, research organised outside classrooms---and, often consequently, to processes of formulating public policy. Moreover, its existence is not peculiar to the study of IT but has been prominent in investigations into other sectors of the creative industries1. While most investigations on IT industry are undertaken by, and for, scholars of economics, management and business, they are not without lessons for sociologists and anthropologists.
With the proliferation of the landscape and dynamics of IT, we also notice changes in scholarly interest, and emphasis. While social scientists have come to explore facets of this enormous and complex topic, leading to an exciting blend of method and concerns, scholars from economics and management have been increasingly seeking to integrate in their analyses dimensions hitherto considered to be exclusively ‘culturalist’. The question is not how to make, say, anthropological explorations into work practices at a Call Centre more economistic, or the study of the software industry more culturalist. Rather it is to engage with, in an inter-related manner, the problematic of subject construction pertaining to the
1 For instance, it is embedded in the study of Cinema wherein it emerged as the distinct pursuits of ‘Industry Study’ and
‘Film Criticism’; P.ROSEN (1986) ‘Introduction Part 3: Apparatus’, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology; Columbia University Press, New York. (p282)
umbrella term IT, and the levels of analysis2 our investigations entail---viz. capital, labour, identity et al.
Moving away from the dichotomy and euphoria pointed out above, and building on the cross-disciplinary paths undertaken by some recent scholarship, implies reconstituting the canvas of a radical research agenda pertaining to the IT Era. In doing so, there is lot to gain from the two broad trends observed in critical investigations on the landscape of IT, viz. Political Economy and Ethnography. While these often stem from the distinct and specific priorities of individual scholar, taken together they provide a more textured understanding of the dynamics of the IT sector in Indian society. Recognizing this, the seminar aims at exploring the advantages of synergising these allegedly rivalling methodological perspectives in investigating communication processes in general and creative industries in particular3. As a corollary, the seminar deems it important to reflect upon a core set of methodological issues. How do academic investigations approach the variance in data generated by government departments, umbrella trade organisations and consulting firms on the IT industry? What are the issues involved in further explorations on the ecology of telework and telebusiness in India? What potential does ethnographic research hold in a deeper4 understanding of the nature, dynamics and implications of the IT Era in general? How does the field of political economy benefit by incorporating rigorous anthropological insights into the lives of BPO employees as consumers?
2 A.MATTELART & M.MATTELART (1998) Theories of Communication; Sage, New Delhi (p3).
3 B.DAS,V.PARTHASARATHI &G.POITEVIN “Investigation Communication:Remooring the Contours of Research” in B. Bel, J. Brouwer, B.
Das, V. Parthasarathi, G. Poitevin (Ed.) Communication Processes – Vol. 1: Media and Mediation; Sage, New Delhi, 2005.
4RAYMOND WILLIAMS (1977) "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory"; New Left Review No. 82 (Nov-Dec).
I
SSUESP
APERBENEATH IT
Formations of Business, Labour & Identity in the IT sector
The buoyancy of communication as a social phenomenon and intellectual pursuit in the last decade is said to have been shaped by the advent of new information communication technology and, at a more general level, the proliferation of creative industries. The rapid development of and investments around Information Technology has brought about radical changes in production and distribution patterns, terms of trade, employment and livelihoods. In doing so, these processes have been increasingly impacting global economy and society---an impact more amplified in certain countries than others, more intense in pockets within a country than elsewhere5.
Two aspects regarding the alleged novelty of the ‘IT Revolution’ must be flagged---the spatiality of the business interests propelling this industry, and the unique place in economic history of the 90s IT boom. Firstly, the trans-national character of IT enterprises is not a historical novelty, as trans-nationalism was an integral trait of many an international business in manufacturing during the late 19th and early 20th century. These enterprises too, like IT firms of today, could not readily be defined into water-tight national categories, as the place of a firm’s registration, the nationality of its shareholders and that of its management often pointed in different directions6. Secondly, the IT wave---the ‘boom’ and the following ‘bust’--- is a phenomenon which economic history has witnessed before. It has been argued that this wave, rather than constituting an exception to the conventional laws of economics, has brought principles like comparative advantage and the international division of labour into sharper focus7.
Thus, embracing the term “Communication Revolution” amounts to celebrating one of the biggest (post) modern mythologies. For one, this assumes a linear and decisive communication technology, ignoring that technology comes into being, and is utilised, under well-defined socio-political conditions. It also indicates a fetish for technology which not only elevates the means of communication to the status of transformatory agents, but proclaims the revolution in communication to exemplify social transformation itself8. The dominant discourse on IT tends to gloss over the fact that technology is simultaneously Economics, Knowledge and Social Structure: Economics, in it being a product as well as the raw material for the creation of informatic forms; Knowledge, in itself and as an instrument for the further generation of knowledge as data, ideology or culture; and finally Social
5 The skewed proliferation of the IT products and services is so taken for granted that any mention of inequities---of access, investments and mobility---amidst the ‘Information Age’ causes discomfort. In India where 5% of the citizens are literate in English, 3% have telephones, 1% computers and 0.5% Internet access, the Communication Revolution is yet to touch the lives of the bulk of even the employed population.
6 GEOFFREY JONES (2005) “Nationality and Multinationals in Historical Perspective”; Working Paper Series Harvard Business School
7 BRISHTI GUHA (2003) “IT: Deconstructing the Bust that Followed the Boom”; EPW June 14.
8 MATTELART, A. (1980) Mass Media, Ideologies and the Revolutionary Movement; Harvester Press, Sussex (p10). This point has been reiterated specifically in the context of the social application of videography in GARNHAM, N. (1990) "The Myths of Video: A Disciplinary Reminder" in Capitalism and Communication: Global culture and the economics of information; Sage (pp 20-55).
Structure, as its production and orchestration is defined by class, gender and race, within and beyond the territoriality of the nation state. Thus, what in common parlance is referred to as ‘IT’ is not a substance with attributes, but is representative of an ensemble of varying practices, more like constellations of socio-economic processes. Investigating the landscape of the IT industry in India forces one to recognise and explore its multiple dimensions;
although unfolding themselves as an overlapping aggregate, such a complex of dimensions could be separated for conceptual clarity and analytical scrutiny. Comprising of three primary dimensions, IT demands exploration at three levels: with respect to its conception, purpose & enshrined ideas; as forms of transaction and expression including their technological form; and in their structuring set of relations of capital and labour.
Considering these as specific structuring dimensions helps us in refraining from either viewing IT as being autonomous from socio-economic activity, or being necessarily and uni- directionally determining. This is not to deny that the way in which these dimensions have been epistemologically viewed, methodologically prioritised and their inter-relationships explored, gives rise to various heuristic angles of analysis.
Clearly the changes underway---and there are some significant ones---in the realm of information, technology and information technology must be examined without either a nostalgia for the ‘traditional’ or a euphoria for the ‘trendy’. The core of any such examination rests on evaluating how the articulation of the varied activities clubbed under the umbrella term IT differ from pre-existing practices of commerce and communication. As, at one level, the social contexts and economic grounding of IT has many a commonality with that of information technologies of the past—starting from telegraphy9. However, at another level, IT as a techno-economic complex is something radically novel, and thus its articulations cannot be always viewed, or predicted, on the basis of historical precedents.
CONTEXTS
One new phenomena made possible through the IT is Telework10, wherein work is carried out in locations far apart from where such tasks were hitherto being done11. As an integral feature of the emergent service economy, telework has led to business functions--- previously located close to the customer, if not face to face--- being concentrated in and delivered from distant and substantially different milieus. Telework has been part of the landscape of business practices in the US, Western Europe and Japan since the 1980s. For most of the 90s, the boom in call centres, the leading segment of telework, prevailed in Europe; about 90% of call centres in Germany opened after 1991. By the end-1990s, we notice an expansion in the geographical footprint and sectoral domains of telework. The first process constituted the relocation of business functions overseas---i.e. outsourcing existing telework from France to Morocco, and then Senegal, from Spain to Argentina, and from Britain to India, the Caribbean and East Asia. After the turn of the century, a second process emerged: the scope of outsourcing in industrialising countries came to involve not just servicing ‘new economy’ firms of the US, Canada and Britain (software, ITES, telecom) but
9 Dubbed the ‘highway of thought’, telegraphy has been argued as being the 19th century precursor to the Internet and the Information Superhighway; STANDAGE, T. (1998) The Victorian Internet; Walker Publication Company, New York. This also leads us to question the alleged difference between ‘old’ and ‘new media’; for the elements of continuity and change expressed in communication technology and the defining contexts of their social application, see LISA GITLEMAN &GEOFFREY PINGREE (Ed.) 2003 New Media, 1740-1915; MIT Press, Cambridge (especially the introduction “What's New About New Media?”).
10 While this term is used in Europe, ‘telecommuting’ is the term used in the U.S.
11 Although access to Internet is essential for some forms of telework, use of personal computers in conjunction with various forms of telecommunications is often sufficient for telecommuting.
also ‘old’ economy firms (like banks, news agencies, architecture and a host of segments in the entertainment industry).
It is in this milieu of outsourcing---both functional relocation and offshore telework--- that the discourse on IT materialised in India over the last 10 years. The proliferation of Outsourcing in India ought to be comprehended in terms of both its underlying ‘push factors’ and the more overt ‘pull factors’.
At one level, the relocation of business functions can be traced back to the contradictions in industrialised economies. The crisis of Fordist organisation in the West forced its firms to explore and coherently target external markets: initially in peripheral economies of Europe, and later in new and emerging markets elsewhere. Simultaneously, firms started shifting labour-intensive segments of production processes to these economies, to cut labour12 and overhead costs. Thus, we realise that the phenomenon of outsourcing is neither unique to the IT sector nor is simply a result of the advent of new information-communication technology; it has been an outcome, and an extension, of the economic forces at play in industrialised countries over the last three decades. In other words, outsourcing in the information service sectors is an extension of the economic dynamics of the 70s and 80s wherein segments of the manufacturing sector in the industrialised countries were relocated to industrialising and least industrialised countries of Central America and South East Asia13. Transnational IT firms are constantly looking for cheaper labour with sufficient skills that can be retained on a contractual basis; on their part, the Indian firms are continuing to utilize the advantage of lower labour and administration costs while foraying into the global market of information-intensive services.
At another level, the Liberalisation-Privatisation-Globalisation (LPG) driven emphasis and growing reliance on the world market for growth within India has witnessed export- oriented industrial policy---and, importantly, a complementing orientation in financial and commercial policies. The resulting dependence on the buoyancy and dynamism of external markets has in turn led national public policy to shape domestic institutional and production structures accordingly. The constant liberalisation of domestic policies and structures is further driven by the fact that India is one of the many countries competing for a share of the (currently) growing market of offshore ITES providers14. Thus, competition between transnational enterprises to seek more amenable and rewarding milieus (in terms of the cost of workers, quality of core infrastructure and juro-administrative systems) for relocating business functions overlaps and is intimately connected with the competition between national economies/polities of industrialising countries to attract, retain and/or service the needs of these enterprises (through labour laws, human and physical infrastructure, national intellectual property legislation and liberalised economic spheres). In fact, these two levels of competition are two sides of the same coin, wherein networks of, among others, labour, capital and technology reinforce each other.
Two further aspects demand attention here: the dynamics of relocation and the structure of outsourcing. The dynamics of relocation of US and European firms was multi- staged: in the late-1980s and early-1990s firms from the former initially set up IT and other
12 The contours of the welfare states in the West---which emphasized employment security, work safety norms and social welfare to most employees---propelled the search for labour markets overseas provided the internal rationale for relocating labour intensive businesses overseas. This was most visible in countries of Central America and East Asia where, apart from attractions of lower wage rate, affective norms and mechanisms of welfarism were absent.
13 Besides, strict environmental regulations in industrialised countries had also compelled transnationals to relocate many polluting manufacturing facilities/segments, invariably to least industrialised countries.
14 Others include Barbados, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic and the Philippines, while Morocco and lately Senegal leads the voice based service providing countries in the Francophonic world.
operations in, for instance, Ireland to take advantage of the English speaking, lower cost pool of educated labour15. Similarly, European firms relocated from large financial/industrial cities to low wage regions within the country (like Scotland & the Midlands in Britain, or Andalusia in Spain). In search for further conducive environments, the next phases saw relocation to leading industrialising countries like Argentina and India, and subsequently to smaller economies like the Philippines and Sri Lanka16. For instance British Airlines first relocated their call centres from London to Glasgow, and only later to India--- something driven by not only lower wages but the ability of firms to undermine working standards (work time, job security) in industrialising countries17. Moreover within India, while the initial glut was concentrated in the prime and pre-existing service centres of Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, only more recently have BPOs entered into cities with still lower costs and costs of living--- be they otherwise large cities like Calcutta, or non-metropolitan centres such as Cochin.
A deeper look at the structure of outsourcing by Euro-American firms indicates it to have two tiers: relocating business functions to India, and therein further outsourcing of support services to the informal/unorganised sector. The latter signifies not just an economic but legal benefit, as it entails relocating the liability of the employers to outside the firm--- the prime instance being in the transport of teleworkers18. Moreover, the extent to which benefits of increased revenue to the proprietors/contractors of support services are transferred to the workers (security guards, caterers, taxi drivers) is questionable. Thus, the
‘dual outsourcing’ illustrates the impact of the BPO sector of the IT industry on both intellectual and physical labour---which equally, albeit in their own ways, are representative of an unorganised workforce.
STATE INTERVENTION
The growth of telework and outsourcing has varied not only across sectors within the IT industry but also on account(?) of their wider formative circumstances. On the face of it, reduced costs of telecommunications services, suitable technological infrastructure and investment by NRIs, anonymous overseas VCs and managers/proprietors of a transnational capitalist class formed the bedrock of the success of private entrepreneurship in India’s IT sector. But these needed, and continue to need, constant support through public investment- --in skilled human resources and tightly controlled juro-administrative regimes; they equally demand incremental reprioritisations in wider state policy---trade liberalization, fiscal incentives and changes in labour laws19. Is the IT story in India indicative of successful private entrepreneurship as portrayed by standing narrative? Or is it a gestating result of state intervention in contiguous sectors since the mid 1970s, well before the term IT appeared on the horizon of dominant discourses?
15 IGNATIUS CHITHELEN (2004) ‘Outsourcing to India: Causes, Reaction and Prospects”; EPW March 6. But now there are regular reports of some of these Irish operations closing down. Is this a result of a cyclical bust, following the 1990s boom? Is it due to the rising cost of labour in Ireland?
16 Although the first BPO unit was set up in Sri Lanka in 1983, as a sector it started emerging after 2000, gaining rapid momentum from 2004; A baseline sector analysis of the BPO industry in Sri Lanka; Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA) & LIRNEasia; Report prepared by LIRNEasia (Sept.) 2006.
17 In Global Circulation: Life and Struggles in European Call Centres; Workers Solidarity, New Delhi, 2006.
18 This becomes crucial during an accident or crime while a teleworker is being transported to and back from work. The most prominent case was when HP Global Delivery India Centre (Bangalore) shirked its responsibility after Pratibha, its employee, was raped and murdered by an unauthorized driver; The Hunt for Profit - MNCs Driven Business Process Outsourcing in India; Indian Federation of Trade Unions (AP State Committee), Hyderabad, 2006 (January) p1.
19 BALAKRISHNAN,B “Benign Neglect or Strategic Intent?: Contested Lineage of Indian Software Industry”; EPW 9 Sept. 2006 (p3865-3872)
Addressing this calls for closer analysis of the relationship between the strategies adopted by private firms and national---and state-level---ICT policies, which embrace several sectors such as telecommunications, human resources, law, taxation and finance. For, it has been argued that India’s pleasing export performance has to be seen in the context of the national system of innovation evolved over the last five decades when the state played a proactive role, and thus cannot be attributed entirely to the market oriented policies of the 1990s20. The emergence of Bangalore as an IT hub in the 90s has also been explained as one of the results of the concentration of electronics and aeronautics industries in the public and private sectors, and specialised state-run research centres, in the city. These, it is argued, created a web of backward and forward linkages and a pool of researchers which, in turn and over the last 15 years, instigated many private sector electronics companies to spring up in, or move to, Bangalore21. Even globally, in depth analyses over a period of three decades suggest that industrial and industrialising countries alike could not have been successful, either in hardware or software, without some form of government intervention22.
From the mid-1990s we see a change in the nature of state intervention. The rationale of promoting BPOs through fiscal incentives, tax concessions and income tax exemptions, lies in this segment being as a remunerative, quick and, for now, increasing source of foreign exchange for the State. The conception of IT Parks, like SEZ in manufacturing, entail the State providing a dual set of advantages to firms: i.e. not only granting major financial benefits to private capital (often at the cost of the public exchequer) but also juro- administrative exemptions that adversely impact the rights of labour. Thus, the administrative mechanisms concerning labour hitherto adopted by firms to check strikes--- like the ‘Works Council’ in Germany, meant to represent employees but bound in strict legal frameworks including being disallowed to call for strikes---are outsourced to the regimes of industrialising countries. The latter becoming the guarantor against strikes, through legislative means, in as much as such guarantees form a prerequisite for firms investing in the concerned region23.
INDUSTRY STRUCTURE
On the face of it, the nature of outsourcing, of business functions being relocated, by western and transnational firms range from data entry to software engineering. Business functions outsourced are both, high-skill jobs in software development (on grounds of cost effectiveness/labour cost), and low-skill clerical tasks such as data entry or insurance claim processing (which do not readily attract labour in home countries, besides immigrants as in the EU). This is often portrayed as constituting an opportunity for industrialising countries like India---having people with basic college education and language skills, as also those highly trained with specialised knowledge---to enhance their competitive position in the world economy. Such jobs do offer opportunities for leapfrogging, not as much for national
20 K. J. JOSEPH (2002) “Growth of ICT and ICT for Development: Realities of the Myths of the Indian Experience”; WIDER Discussion Paper No. 2002/78, UNU World Institute for Development Economics Research, Helsinki.
21 LATEEF, A (1996) Linking-up with the Global Economy: A Case Study of the Bangalore Software Industry; International Institute of Labour Studies/ILO, Geneva.
22 RICHARD COOPEY (Ed.) Information Technology Policy: An International History; OUP, New York, 2004. While individual chapters narrate particular stories of the role of government policy in time periods considered to be most crucial, the anthology weaves each story into a larger plot that provides a coherence beyond specific national and sectoral purviews.
Heeks’s chapter on India shows that, unlike the more complex & difficult realm of hardware, software and ITES have ideal springboard characteristics for private players; on his thesis of the active role of the Indian government in promoting IT based industrialisation see Heeks, R. (1996) India’s Software Industry: State Policy, Liberalization and Industrial Development;
Sage, New Delhi.
23 All this while outsourcing firms continue to recognise Unions in their home countries, however much their permissible scope has declined over the 90s; we shall return to this issue in a while.
economies as a whole as to individual teleworkers and firms therein. But a deeper look reveals that the range of business functions being outsourced does not convey the skewed structure of the tasks being undertaken within the servicing economy. The bulk of outsourcing to India involves labour-intensive jobs requiring lower skills. In this sense, the advantages and limits of leapfrogging in/through Telework hinges around, and has enormous implications on, the international division of labour and terms of trade in information services.
The dynamic element of the IT industry is limited to the ITES and BPO segments whose vibrancy and expansion relies on the buoyancy of external economies, global labour markets and agility24 of firms---all of which entail growth for domestic firms under dependent conditions. Such dependence is reiterated by capital markets: the international market for ITES being more lucrative than domestic ones, firms operating in this segment not only reap a high market value of their shares also and, because of this, have a continued and further easier access to capital markets in the processes of their expansion---something which does not come with similar ease to firms involved in the high value/skill and product segments.
Moreover, it has been opined that competition between industrialising countries who are providers of lower-end IT services will commoditize some of the basic processes---as is with in the case of raw materials, and less so in primary products; this would drive down the prices of these services such that the benefits of low wages would be transferred to TNCs, leaving little behind in the industrialising economies/world25. As a corollary, the question demanding attention is how does the changing structure of the IT industry, especially changes in the hierarchy of segments of knowledge production, temper the future of the
‘India story’?
Behind the reality and rhetoric of the ITES segment lies a less rosy picture, that of the software segment. Undoubtedly, since the 90s decade, Software has become one of India’s leading exports26, and India is the largest software exporting country outside the OECD. But of concern is a related figure: i.e. the rising share of exports in the total revenue from software, roughly from 50% to 70% during the 90s decade27. Moreover, and in qualitative terms, three uncomfortable facts have emerged: first, for all the hype of rapid sectoral expansion, the Indian software industry has occupied a marginal position in the world market; second, notwithstanding high growth rates, India’s exports have been largely low value output; and third, the size of the domestic market is less than a third of India’s export market28.
The software segment on the whole has neither been able to generate significant employment, nor create and export high value products, nor even contribute significantly to production processes of domestic firms. Deploying IT in domestic industry in substantial and not merely instrumental ways29 would yield---apart from new occupational categories---
24 J.MILLAR (200)“Sustaining Software Teletrade in Bangalore: Fostering Market Agility through Economic Competence”; EPW June 24 (p2253-2262).
25C.P.CHANDRASEKHAR &JAYATI GHOSH (2003) “Outsourcing for Development”; Business Line 2 Dec.
26 The share of software in India’s exports has risen from a negligible percentage in 1990 to 7.89 per cent in 2000-01; NAGESH
KUMAR (2001) “Indian Software Industry Development: International and National Perspective”; EPW Vol. 36/45 (pp4278-4290).
27 http://www.nasscom.org
28 ANTHONY P.D’COSTA (2006) “The Indian Software Industry in the Global Division of Labour” in Anthony D'Costa & E. Sridharan (Ed.) India in the Global Software Industry: Innovation, Firm Strategies and Development; Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.
29 The narrow, instrumental deployment of ICT is most amplified in the social sector wherein organisational planning and scholarly studies on intervention in India have predominantly focused on the role of the means of communication in affecting social change; for instance Nair, K.S. & White, S. (1993) Perspectives on Development Communication; Sage, New Delhi. For early reflections on the drawbacks of the instrumental approach to technology in social intervention, see PARTHASARATHi, V. (1997) The Problem, Seminar No. 455 (Alternatives in Communication).
greater flexibility and efficiency to production systems, thereby making them more competitive in regional and global markets. Of course, the dilemma such deployment poses- --besides the contested and quantitative issue of labour redundancy---pertains to the altered nature of skills required and patterns of aggregate labour demand, thus bringing to light the qualitative dimension of labour redundancy30.
A closer scrutiny of the export profile reveals that while being concentrated in the US, India’s software exports are skewed towards custom software work and programming services; the development and sale of pre-packaged software defines a negligible share of software export31. Concern also stems from the fact that while firms from industrialised countries have been increasingly buying Indian software to raise the efficiency of their operations, domestic firms have been unable, or unwilling, to adequately harness indigenous ICT capabilities to transform themselves, and the national economy. More discomforting is the suggestion that not only is IT-induced productivity and growth confined to the industrialised countries but that India’s export oriented IT growth strategy seems to have contributed to, even if not substantially, firms from such countries to become more efficient and competitive--- while definitely having adverse effects on the innovative performance of domestic firms32. This draws attention to how national policy locates
‘development through ICT’ in the drive for ‘ICT for growth’, two thrust areas which are not mutually exclusive but complementary.
The structure of the computer business in India reveals that precisely because the software industry has remained satisfied with low value/skill/risk products and services, it has come to create weak links with the domestic manufacturing industry33. The strength and vibrancy of any software industry, we recognise, lies in the dynamism of the embedded software segment; this in turn is closely linked with the manufacturing industry, both capital and consumer, which form the backbone of any national economy. Beneath the hype of ‘new’ economy firms and media hagiographies of IT tsars, we find that the low value/skill traits of domestic software industry has more in common with sectors of the ‘old’ economy-- - typified by their long tail--- than with equivalent concerns in industrialised countries. This questions the distinction between ‘old economy’ and ‘new economy’ firms (as also the autonomy of the latter from national/domestic capital and public sector enterprises)34. The hardware and software sectors being two sides of the same coin, such weak links pose the biggest hurdle to the development of an interdependent growth path for the IT industry as a whole.
30 M.VIJAYABASKAR &BALAJI PARTHASARATHY (2003) “Difussion of Information and Communication Technologies in India: Labour Market Implications for Developing Countries”; Report prepared by the Indian Institute of Information Technology towards an IDRC Research Project; IIIT, Bangalore.
31 CHANDANA CHAKRABORTY &CJAYACHANDRAN (2001) “Software Sector: Trends and Constraints”; EPW August 25-31.
32 K.J.JOSEPH (2002) Growth of ICT and ICT for Development: Realities of the Myths of the Indian Experience; WIDER Discussion Paper (No. 2002/78), UNU World Institute for Development Economics Research, Helsinki. This paper underscores the need to recognize the complementary role of the domestic market in promoting innovation and exports on the one hand, and IT- induced productivity, competitiveness and growth on the other.
33 P.NATH &A.HAZRA “Configuration of Indian Software Industry”; EPW 23 Feb. 2002 (p737-742)
34 The issue of distinction and autonomy, besides being incessantly bombarded by the media, has been emphasised by even critical scholars such as CAROL UPADHYA (2004) “A New Transnational Capitalist Class?: Capital Flows, Business Networks and Entrepreneurs in the Indian Software Industry”; EPW 27 Nov. The contention that entrepreneurs/firms in the IT industry convey a new’ transnational capitalist class, as elucidated in this paper, is under question: historical evidence shows that a great deal of international business in manufacturing during the late nineteenth and early 20th century cannot be readily fitted into water-tight national categories, as the place of a firm’s registration, the nationality of its shareholders and that of its management often pointed in different directions; see Geoffrey G. Jones (2005) “Nationality and Multinationals in Historical Perspective”; Working Paper Series Harvard Business School.
LABOUR AND UNIONISM
While the mobility of IT workers from industrialising countries like India is still restricted by industrialised countries35, this is becoming less problematic for Indian IT companies as offshoring progressively replaces on-site work (Carol). But this is true largely for those companies content with low value services. For instance, in the media industries, which hinge on IT and thus partake in increasing amounts of offshore work (animation, film production, audience surveys) the exponential level of value addition takes place in the on- site tasks36. The question is of the nature of offshoring in India, and the benefits accruing to firms, national economy and society. The expanding base of low skill services in, say, the animation sector has led to a plethora of training organisation providing only low skill courses. This carries the danger of stifling innovation in and the expansion of, the indigenous animation industry--- which may then unable to compete in the international and national markets. Thus, the market structure of outsourcing in animation, which favours low skill work being offshored, in turn, impinges the development of firms’ capabilities and investments in human resources.
Teleworkers constitute a contingent labour force that is flexible, readily available and easily disposable. Virtual teams or enterprises are being set up comprising specialists from around the globe--- teams that can be mobilised instantaneously--- who work around the clock passing on the tasks from one time zone to the next. While proprietors in the Indian IT industry have benefited from being part of transnational flows of capital---not to forget the numerous retail and institutional investors---the intellectual and physical labour driving the industry is becoming increasingly localised within India, albeit more mobile between pockets of the country than hitherto. These unequal shifts in the flow capital and labour have not only shaped the structure of the IT and allied industries but also impacted certain domains in the manufacturing and (other) service sectors, and the national market of (intellectual) labour as a whole. If the reality of the boom in the IT sector is taken at face value, then it is likely to adversely influence, at least in the short run, other sectors of the domestic economy competing for skilled labour. This calls for assessing the impact of the diffusion of ICTs across different sectors in the economy on the labour market in India, especially since the multitudes of production relations and labour market institutions here differ from those in industrialised economies37.
The relationship between the IT industry, Telework/ers and Trade Unions is a delicate one. On the one hand, in their efforts to gain wider reach and greater efficiency in a globalised economy, trade unions in industrialised countries have long increased the utilisation of IT in their activities38. On the other hand, unions in the IT sector in
35 Indian teleworkers in the US are yet to break the 'glass ceiling' to reach high level managerial positions. Barring a few spectacular examples of those who successfully moved from being professionals to entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, most Indian in the US work at low and middle levels of the IT industry, are paid less than their US-born colleagues and often denied fair promotion opportunities; see ROLI VARMA,EVERETT MROGERS (2004) “Indian Cyber Workers in US”; EPW December 25.
36 It needs to be borne in mind that the proportion of the total expenditure allocated to production---wherein the overwhelming majority offshoring takes place---is decreasing compared to that allocated to marketing---wherein the bulk of tasks continue to remain on-site, and thus within industrialised countries. At a more general level, we must recognise that profitability in the creative industries, under the current competitive regime, is based less on decreasing input costs and more on harnessing downstream/output capabilities like marketing and rights management. HUYGENS,M.,BADEN-FULLER,C., VAN DEN
BOSCH,FA.J.&VOLBERDA, H.W.‘Co-evolution of Firm Capabilities and Industry Competition: Investigating the Music Industry, 1877-1997 (p971-1011). J. Eliashberg, A. Elberse, M. A.A.M. Leenders (2005) The Motion Picture Industry: Critical Issues in Practice, Current Research & New Research Directions; Working Paper, Harvard Business School.
37 VIJAYABASKAR & PARTHASARATHY op cit.
38 Examples of trade union networks on-line include LaborNet, Union Resource Network, SoliNet and Labour Telematics Centre.
industrialised countries have been opposing outsourcing, and/or affecting the extent to which firms can outsource work39. In an era when the free trade of goods and services is being promoted, the wave of protectionist attitudes in cross-border trade in IT services has punctured the myth of equitable globalisation.
On their part, Unions in the IT sector in industrialising countries like India appear to be non-existent40. This may be ascribed initially due to their organisational inability to engage with flexible work-place/time arrangements of a trans-national business, and subsequently due to their ideological difficulty in reconciling ‘highly’ paid middle class youth as workers41. The lack of opportunities for socialisation in the workplace for teleworkers is not conducive to unionisation; in fact, the nature of telework makes it difficult for unionisation based on inherited cognitive notions and institutional practices of trade unions42. But of late the greatest hurdle to unionisation in India has emerged from policy/legislative interventions that have disabled the very act of unionisation in the IT sector---even in states governed by Left parties. Moreover, unionisation is severely constrained by high turnover of workforce43 and strong acculturation practices by the management44.
WORK AND IDENTITY
While the software segment of the IT industry is male dominated, the BPO segment has almost equal number of men and women. This makes us explore how the changing realities of work and workplace in the BPO segment carry an overlapping set of implications for women45. Research on the gender specific impact found that the new information technologies have increased employment opportunities for women, especially in the service sector in banking and finance. However, some of these changes also appear to have made many existing jobs occupied by women in manufacturing redundant or obsolete. The overtly optimistic belief that Post-Fordist work scenarios in the IT industry are beneficial for women in both industrialising and industrialised countries calls for re-evaluation46. The spatial
39 About 20 states in USA have put up legal barriers against the awarding of government contracts to non-US firms;BISWAJIT
NAG “Business Process Outsourcing: Impact and Implications”; Bulletin on Asia-Pacific Perspectives 2004/05 (p59-73).
40 While no Unions, there are two associations of professional in the BPO and software segments: UNITES and the Centre for Business Process Outsourcing Professionals (CBPOP). There have also been a move to create an IT professionals' forums in Bangalore and Hyderabad aimed at “new types of organisation as much as they look back to traditional unionism”.
The forums in both cities have been launched with the assistance of the Swiss based Union Network International (UNI).
These IT forums reflect the strategy adopted by Union Network International, created in 2000 from a merger of four union federations in the commerce, finance, telecommunications and the media sector, to reach out to non-unionised workers, including what it calls "atypical" workers in new sectors of the economy. It exposes the murky underbelly of India's IT sector, albeit a murkiness existing across all sectors of Indian economy and society. In Bangalore, the forum arranged legal action against an agent allegedly offering to IT students jobs in Silicon Valley, and a training company that swindled 50 students of Rs.60,000 each for a non-existent e-commerce course and job placement service. ANDREW BIBBY (2002) “Labour organisation in India's IT industry” http://www.andrewbibby.com/telework/india.html
41 This despite the fact that even the earliest studies revealed that teleworkers in industrialising countries, especially those performing low-skill tasks, are subjected to very low labour standards; A.SOARES (1991) “The Hard Life of the Unskilled Workers in New Technologies: Data Entry Clerks in Brazil” in H.J. Bullinger (Ed.) Human Aspects in Computing; Elsevier Science Publishers, Amsterdam.
42 This should not ignore the plethora of efforts at Unionisation, the frequency & expansion of union-led Strikes, and the consequences of both in European call centres (Workers Solidarity p7-13)
43 In India, the high turnover in BPO staff (annually around 50 per cent in call centres) is due to job-related stresses and the availability of jobs in rival companies with higher wages; CHITHELEN, I., 2004. “Outsourcing to India: causes, reaction and prospects”; EPW March 6, 2004.
44We also need to take cognisance that firms in the ITES sector have been very successful in using exclusivist and inclusivist strategies to keep existing unions at bay; seeERNESTO NORONHA &PREMILLA D’CRUZ “Organising Call Centre Agents:
Emerging Issues” EPW May 27, 2006 (p2115-2121)
45 The transformation in the standing of South East Asian countries from newly industrialising economies (NICs) to ‘Asian Tigers’ was based on, amongst others, the large numbers of female labour in the manufacture sector, including in the assembly of hardware/IT products.
46 While the assumption that the IT “industry” proper is post-Fordist could itself be questioned, the experiences of the Asian Indian women in the US on an H-1B or H-4 visa highlight the deepening contradiction between the economic and social
reorganization of women's work through teleworking involves a unique blend of high technology and casualisation of women's labour. Early studies in the Caribbean have shown that the majority of employees in the data entry and information processing industries are young women who often work under very low labour standards47. More recently, and going beyond the wide ranging agreement that the impact of ICTs is not gender neutral, studies have shown that their implications on women, in terms of employment and empowerment, are dependent on the context within which they are deployed48. In 2001 women occupied 37% of jobs in the ITES, and 20% of the professional jobs in the software industry. But as a result of the pre-existing prejudices about occupations suitable to men and women, women tend to be better represented in desktop publishing and software programming, but not so in hardware design, operating systems or computer maintenance49---a phenomenon indicative of the larger system of the gendered division of labour. Does teleworking offer a fresh, and unique, set of opportunities for women? Or does it further disguise, and even play upon, their ‘double burden’ in the garb of flexible hours, independent work, operating from home and gender-neutral salary structures? To address these questions, implies foremost gendering studies on the IT sector, something which is still not the norm even in countries which otherwise have generated a variety of gender-conscious critical scholarship50
The notion and self-perception of ‘identity’ has undergone tremendous changes with the advent of new communication technology. While we recognise that this has resulted in altering perceptions and the articulation of, amongst other, Territorialisation, Community and Citizenship, at a rudimentary level we may distinguishe three kinds of interplay between identity and technology. Firstly, instances where the technological ‘footprint’ of communication technology has constructed a geographical community of participants and consumers (such as FM radio). Secondly, instances where historically evolved identities have been reaffirmed by the instrumentalities of new technology---such as the politico- geographic articulation of linguistic cultures with the advent of local language broadcasting networks. And thirdly, instances where the industrial application of new technology has constructed and/or reconfigured identities based on common work cultures and labour practices---the most prominent instance being the notion of professional and peer oriented work teams with the creation of Wide Area Networks51.
The phenomenal success of BPOs, particularly call centres, offering high-school and English-speaking graduates quick employment with comparatively high wages suggests the
restructuring, and between the spheres of production and reproduction; see S.UMA DEVI (2002) “Globalisation, Information Technology and Asian Indian Women in US; EPW October 26.
47 RUTH PEARSON (1993) “Gender and New Technology in the Caribbean by Ruth Pearson” in Janet Momsen (Ed.) Women and Change in the Caribbean; James Currey, London.
48SHOBA ARUN,RICHARD HEEKS &SHARON MORGAN (2004) ICT Initiatives, Women and Work in Developing Countries: Reinforcing or Changing Gender Inequalities in South India?; Development Informatics Working Paper Series No. 20, Institute for Development Policy and Management (University of Manchester), Manchester. This presents two case studies from the same geographical area in South India, involving women with relatively similar educational qualifications: one, a market-oriented and gender-blind approach that enables the competitive forces to exert an effect, and the other a state-led approach that deliberately and concertedly intervenes with a specific focus on gender.
49 NANCY HAFKIN &NANCY TAGGART (2001) Gender, Information Technology, and Developing Countries: An Analytic Study; Academy for Educational Development (AED), United States Agency for International Development.
50 It is surprising that the first survey on the BPO segment in Sri Lanka has no mention of the sex ratio of BPO employees, let alone details on the status of and impact on women teleworkers; see A baseline sector analysis of the BPO industry in Sri Lanka; Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA) & LIRNEasia; Report prepared by LIRNEasia (Sept.) 2006.
51 This does not exclude reiterating existing elements of the social structure. Given that 90% BPO workers are graduates, and the class/caste based access to such education, there are negligible numbers of OBCs, SCs and STs in call centres. While this may change over the next decade, assuming the boom maintains itself, this provides a rationale for positive discrimination--- even if along the dis-similar lines as practiced in the ‘home’ countries of the firms.
creation of one such community of workers. Call centres, in particular, provide ample evidence of the meticulous gentrifying strategies where natives are groomed, including by other albeit metropolitan natives, to serve transnational bourgeoisie and overseas working class---many of whom are located in former imperial centres52. Thus, the outsourcing of labour is integrally connected to the outsourcing of identity; in fact, the construction of the identity of employees is crucial to the efficacy of their role as labour. And in this sense, both guises of the workers--- i.e. identity and labour--- play out as commodities in the trans- national flows of culture and capital. Apart from the role played by call centres as a neo- colonial workplace in unmooring local identities to construct trans-national labour identities, an equally crucial consequence of such a construction is the creation of young teleworkers as a community of consumers. Their individual practices of consumption, together with the sub-culture/community of consumers they constitute, must not be viewed as the cultural or narrowly economic consequences of the development of cluster-based telecentres. Rather, these are very much part of the articulations of the wider economic structures and flows of capital in our times---of which outsourcing is one element. The economic geography of IT clusters entail not only units of production of products and services---software, BPO, call centre---but also of units of consumption of a variety of consumer goods and services---such that processes of production and consumption tend to impacting on each other. The construction of teleworkers in ITES as commercial and cultural beings, such that the latter forms the core of the former is one reason which explains the high concentration of shopping malls and multiplex theatres in/near IT parks and telecentre clusters53.
52DIVYA MCMILLIN (2006) “Outsourcing Identities: Call Centres and Cultural Transformation in India” EPW January 21, 2006 (p235-241).
53 It is not an unrelated matter that the economics of scale sustaining mass retail (via Malls) in India derive sustenance from processes of outsourcing in the manufacture sector.
P
RESENTATIONSSession Chair Presentation
Day 1
1030-1140
Nasir Tyabji Indian Software Industry:
Distortions and Consolidation of Gains Pradosh Nath
Emerging issues of gender, caste, class & locational equity:
The IT sector Sujata Gothoskar
1200-1310
P. Balakrishnan IT Software and Service Boom:
What we know, do not know and ought to know K J Joseph
Addressing Barriers to Trade in ITES:
Indo-US Trade and prospects under a possible FTA Arpita Mukherjee
1415-1525
Amrit Srinivasan Film: Fun @ Sun (32 min.)
Gautam Sonti & Carol Upadhya
Work, Family & Health:
Call Centre ‘Executives’ in Bangalore Manoj Kumar Jena
1540-1700
Nina Rao Trans-national Capital and Tele-Workers:
Status and Interventions Animesh Das
Problems of unionizing:
Building a framework for analysis Ashim Roy
Day 2
1000-1200
Shashibhushan Upadhyaya Film: Modern Times (87 min.)
Charles Chaplin Before IT, Behind IT:
Working Class Consciousness and the First IT Network Deep Kanta Lahiri-Choudhury
1220-1330
P. Vigneshwara Trajectories of Capitalism in an Outpost of the Global Economy:
Capital, Labour & Culture in the Software Outsourcing Industry Carol Upadhya
Work and Emotion:
An Ethnography of ‘Spectramind’
Biswajit Das
1430-1540
Biswajit Das Organising the ‘Empowered’:
Mobilisation aspects of labour in the service sector Babu P. Remesh
Organising Call Centre Workers:
The ‘Young Professionals Collective’ experience Ketaki Rege
1600-1710
Vibodh Parthasarathi Common Ground in a Divided World Annanya Bhattacharjee
Information Technology & Engineering:
An integrated approach Jibon Ray
P
ROCEEDINGSIn his introduction, the convenor Vibodh Partharthasarathi visualised the seminar as a dialogue at two levels: as a sharing of findings, documentation and experiences between academia and unions; and, as a cross-disciplinary reflection between economists, sociologists and anthropologists tracking the many facets of the IT sector in India.
Chair: Prof. Nasir Tyabji (CJNS, JMI)
Indian Software Industry:
Distortions and Consolidation of Gains Dr. Pradosh Nath (NISTADS, New Delhi)
Emerging issues of gender, caste, class & locational equity:
The IT sector Dr. Sujata Gothoskar (IUFW, Mumbai)
Pradosh Nath began by reaffirming the unprecedented contribution of the IT sector to employment generation, domestic revenue and export earning; and that the sector has withstood its low value, low skill, and high volume tag to grow in size over the last two decades. However, the structure of this business is characterised by a ‘long tail’, i.e. there exist small number of very large companies, and a large number of small companies.
Elaborating on the prevailing knowledge hierarchies in this industry, Nath viewed its backyard being constituted of the knowledge of terminated specificity, and its frontyard being made of new firm specific knowledge. It is the former that formed the core of outsourcing for a firm and also for an industry. The long tail of the software segment, Nath argued, dwells in the backyard. He also reiterated the increasingly widespread observation that the IT sector in India draws sustenance from the global market, and not from the local market. As a result, its basic dynamics has been rooted in outsourcing by firms, from the first world---most of whom are dominant players in their own fields of business in the global market. This has led to the Indian IT industry being located at the bottom of the knowledge hierarchy, where the bottom is highly segmented. Thus, the Indian software industry consists of a large share of low knowledge-level activities to small volumes of high knowledge-level activities. This has, in turn, led to two kinds of distortions: first, in the structure of the labour market---i.e. high-skill labour being deployed for low skill jobs within this sector, wages for which are relatively higher than those in non-IT sectors; and second, in the structure of the (software) product market---whereby links between this sector and domestic manufacturing/engineering systems are yet to systemically emerge and diffuse.
Given this scenario, he located the Indian software industry within the broad understanding of market and hierarchy, where outsourcing could be for knowledge complements or for knowledge of terminated specificity. Both types are part of a dynamic process of building competitiveness through creation of enterprise specific knowledge. The main distinction between the two, Nath asserted, is where as the former is closer to the process of creation of enterprise specificity; the latter is closer to the market pool of knowledge. Being alienated from the domestic manufacturing sector such a structure creates duality in the labour market as well as in the overall industry structure of the country. The distortions thus created disable the process of consolidation from the employment and income gains from the growth of the industry.
Sujata Gothoskar stated that a critique of the IT sector has much in common with the classic critique of the ‘trickle down’ theory. Being at the forefront of the alleged Knowledge Economy, the IT sector raises many issues, at different levels, pertaining to the politics of knowledge. This is principally because in India knowledge has always been shaped by frameworks of access---historical, sociological and economic. And despite the context of work in the IT sector being undoubtedly global, the labour market and the actual work performed are predominantly local. This has made certain kinds of labour/professions/work---once limited and/or historically denied to women---becoming important in shaping the perceptions of work by young women in the labour market. In India, with its legacy of colonialism and a particular historic response to it, the labour market for knowledge-based work is further restricted to a certain section, gender, caste and class of people. This caste and class grid has very different implications for different sections of women. While in most Call Centres located in the metros men and women are employed in almost equal numbers, in segments website designing there is a predominance of men from small towns, with almost no women.
Two sets of indications emerged from the case examples of Call Centres she had investigated: first, that there are increasingly large sections of information workers who find themselves alienated from the ‘knowledge’, and its contexts, they deal with. Secondly, while there are few but increasing numbers of men from the historically deprived castes and regions, most women stem from urban and upper caste backgrounds. Nevertheless, in Marathi and Hindi Call Centres, where many more women work, wages are 1/3rd to 1/6th of those in international Call Centres where the medium of service is English.
Nasir Tyabji flanked by Pradosh Nath (L) & Sujata Gothoskar (R)
In his remarks as the chair, Nasir Tyabji focussed on Nath’s observations that IT sector constitutes low-skilled work, that competition amongst domestic firms is based purely on price, and that knowledge is generated in foreign firms. In this light, Tyabji questioned the long-term future of the Indian IT industry, especially if it continued to ignore the requirements of domestic, especially manufacturing, sectors across all industries. He also suggested that if state policy and firm activity are both geared towards servicing the US market, there cannot be any significant shift in the orientation of this sector without a change in foreign policy. Lastly, Tyabji wondered whether the difficulties faced in organising the employees in the IT sector was due to such workforce considering themselves to be middle class, rather than the working class. P. Balakrishnan emphasised that the rise of the IT sector should not be related simply to the economic changes of 1991, as growth in this sector pre- dates 1991. He added that one of the biggest consumers of IT in India being the Government, the future of this sector would also depend on the “demand” created by the latter.
