My boyfriend loves free, open source software, not only because it doesn't cost him a cent to use, but because it bucks the trend of capitalism and people making money out of their creations. His operating system is Linux's Ubuntu, which takes its name from the African term for neighborliness and brotherhood. One thread on the Ubuntu forums, however, shows a much less prettier face than one would expect from a brotherhood of software users.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=815635
Important Changes to Dell Ubuntu Support
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This is just a heads up that Dell has decided that it is too expensive to keep the Ubuntu Technicians in Ottawa on (as well as all the XPS techs and DOC techs from Ottawa). In mid April 100% of the DOC staff and 60% of the XPS staff in Ottawa were let go. The remaining staff, including all the Ubuntu staff were given notice that their jobs are over as of the end of June.
Effective Monday June 9, 2008 all Ubuntu support will be moving from Ottawa, ON, Canada to Pasay, Philippines. What does this mean for you/me? If you have a Dell that shipped with Ubuntu on it, and have anything wrong with it at all, and you want to speak to someone who you can understand, you must call before June 9th.
Now some of you may be wondering how I know this? I was formerly a Dell DOC and later an XPS agent in Ottawa. As such, I still have many friends both on the Ubuntu support queue, and in XPS. The kicker of the whole situation is that Dell is not letting the Ubuntu staff go as of next Monday, instead they are being required to take XPS(hardware and windows support) calls for the last three weeks that the center is open.
What's really strange is that while I worked there, Dell was proud of the percentage of their support staff that were located in North America, but as soon as the US dollar dropped and the economy slowed down, they pulled out (they built and were scheduled to open a second building in Ottawa in April, instead they are closing down and looking for a buyer in a market where there is currently a 25% vacancy rate for commercial buildings). In a way I'm happy that my friends won't have to listen to customers bitching about how they always get India when they call, that was the worst part about working there... when you get a North American on the phone, don't bitch at them about India, they know only too well and all you do is piss them off (and if you called regarding Ubuntu, and didn't get someone in Ottawa, you dialed the wrong number).
Anyhow, I offer a fond farewell salute to the hard working Ubuntu support staff at the Dell Ottawa Call Center, may your job hunts be short and fruitful (and thanks for all the help over the past year)!
***
This initial post drew a wide variety of reactions: Filipinos began posting on the message boards, saying that although they sympathized with the people who had lost their jobs, Filipinos could understand English well and would therefore serve as good customer service representatives. Other posters claimed that many Filipino call center employees knew English but did not understand the nuances of the language and were therefore ill equipped to deal with the North American market. These same posters often posted messages without bothering to check their grammar or spelling, not to mention their sentence clarity.Tension was, and still is, high on this thread: the message was posted only one day ago, and messages are still trickling in.
There are many ways to view this problem, and there are many perspectives that can come into play and therefore cloud the debates. First, capitalism has taken its toll on many North American companies, and the drive to earn money can rise over and above employee loyalty. With the economic slump, companies have no choice but to try to keep their services without spending a lot on employee compensation - this means taking labor to cheaper places, hence outsourcing. This outsourcing, however, benefits no one but the company: the people who lose their jobs are forced into a job market that has very few openings left in a stagnant economy; while the people who gain them are forced to work long hours, at unholy times, for relatively higher pay in their respective countries. The call center, after all, has to cater to the North American market, so call center employees work from 9 PM to 9 AM in the Philippines.
Call center employees are often tired: they lose sleep, they have to reverse their body clocks, they have no holidays and sometimes have to negotiate for a Christmas break - all for the sake of getting paid about $ 333 a month, a rich sum by Philippine standards. This work, in Marx's words, is alienating: many of the calls follow a script, a prescribed routine; these routines have to be f0llowed strictly, since calls are recorded and monitored. Call center employees may not be working on a factory assembly line or pulling levers and pushing buttons all day, but they are subjected to a new breed of capitalism that silences their protest: money - or the promise of higher pay.
Call center employees are also trained in accent neutralization: they need to take classes to assume a neutral American accent, and they are often trained to understand and recognize idiomatic expressions. The Philippines is also a former American colony, our medium of instruction is English, and English is widely spoken; coupled to cheap labor, the Philippines is fertile ground for call centers to grow. And grow these call centers have.
I find it grossly unfair for people to generalize call center outsourcing and label its new employees as incompetent. Their arguments revolve around lack of knowledge about a culture, and how language is not enough. True, language is not the only way to communicate, but with globalization and a wider audience for American mass media, could we escape knowledge of other peoples' culture? Culture, moreover, is not the be-all and end-all of communication: according to some cultural sociology scholars, culture is a toolbox from which we take different behaviors, actions, reactions, and thought processes. Culture is not a static entity that divides us, but a fluid atmosphere that moves, evolves, changes, and is shared.
I can understand why some North American clients have a difficult time with Indian call center employees. English, when spoken with an Indian accent, can be harder to understand, and Indian culture is not as heavily influenced by American culture as the Philippines' is. Several posters have heaped the Philippines along with India when describing the difficulty of dealing with outsourced call centers; and the Philippines along with China when describing how outsourcing toy making has become dangerous. It is in this anger and fuming that we can see people's underlying conceptions of cultural divides, and how their frustration over a failing economy can unearth old biases once thought to be non-existent.
The other side of the argument, however, is still understandable. Victimized by the capitalist machinery and faced with cheaper labor, the North American labor market has no choice but to fume - and fume it will, invoking stereotypes in the process. In this debate, there are no winners - the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and lines are drawn where there should be none. This forum is only an example of reality. Who is wrong, between the outsourced employees in the Philippines who are taught American culture, and the laid-off employees in North America who show their anger in often hate-laced ways? Can we even get out of this economics-and-capitalism-influenced trap?
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