CSA Assistance outsourced as well

Call center industry professionals in India may find help, ironically, just a call away. They no longer need to remain helpless over job stress-induced ailments like insomnia, depression, and digestive system disorders.

A pioneer effort by an independent body, this is aimed at helping call center executives combat physical and mental disorders through discussions and opening up with peers.

Issues addressed by the Young Professionals Collective (YPC) range from dealing with abusive and racist clients overseas to keeping in touch with family and friends while working ungodly hours for night shifts in order to provide service to customers in the West.

Launched last weekend, the collective is also aimed at fostering awareness and sensitivity on the working conditions prevalent in the income-generating call center sector. Involved in this sensitivity campaign are the call center management teams and their overseas clients, as well as the government and other stakeholders.

Vinod Shetty, a noted city-based labour lawyer, told IANS.

"Our objective is to ensure the framing of standard working conditions in all call centres in India that is at par with international practices,"

Shetty is the brains behind the YPC, with the help of two other colleagues. Plans for registering it as a trust are underway for the next couple of months.

Even with his background as a trade union activist, Shetty assures skeptics that the collective’s function does not include unionizing the exponentially-expanding call center industry. YPC, he insists, is a “welfare organization”.

"We are not going to make a statement against anybody. Instead of a confrontationist attitude, we want to launch a collaborative exercise with the industry as well as the government,"

"We find that most of the call centre professionals today are not equipped to handle the graveyard shifts. This results in grave physical as well as psychological disorders and a high attrition rate in the industry. . . The industry, on its own, is not able to handle the high attrition rate. With the launch of the Young Professionals Collective, call centre companies can now outsource the welfare of their professionals to us."

A help line has been established under the collective to address t issues call center professionals have to contend with, along with the rest of the non-nightshift-scheduled humanity: sexual harassment in the workplace, drug abuse, alcoholism, and unsafe sex.

"In our research, we found that most of the call centre professionals silently suffer at their workplaces, as they don't know where to go to discuss their problems. . . Many are subjected to abusive and racial remarks by their overseas customers. While some organisation provide in-house counselling and psychiatrist service, others just prefer to ignore it,"

"We can't ignore the working conditions in a sector that is earning so much money for the country and is adding thousands of workers every year. . .If we can't offer them international salaries, let's at least provide them with international working conditions."

The call center business is but a component of the $2.6 billion Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry that has emerged among the top income-generating ventures for India. As a matter of fact, a big chunk of the Fortune 500 companies (i.e. General Electric, American Express, British Airways, HSBC, Citibank) have taken their back office operations to Indian shores.

related stories, by category: