Aneesh Aneesh
[…] When labor moves from machine to machine across nations, it is hard to capture in conventional categories […], since conventional labor migration is generally situated within the framework of body migration. The continuous revolutionizing of the instruments of production, distribution, and consumption has enabled a new labor regime in which labor moves and migrates without the worker’s body. The physical ways of performing work are not going to vanish: just as the theater did not disappear after the cinema turned acting bodies into moving pictures, the embodied migration of labor will perhaps never be replaced by virtual labor flows, as some services can be performed only with the body. Virtual and physical migrations are drastically different species in their mode of global integration, even if they tend to produce similar economic effects in terms of jobs and wages. They are as different as cyberspace is from physical space, despite court cases and metaphors to the contrary.
The rules of the road for virtual migration differ from those for physical migration such as body shopping. When a programmer in Delhi accesses a client’s machine in New Jersey, we may define her presence in the United States as virtual presence or tele‐presence, but clearly not as physical presence. In fact, computer networks – pathways of virtual migration – are so insensitive to geography that it is almost impossible to determine the exact physical location of the machine without extraneous knowledge. The network is technologically indifferent to physical location. Knowing the location of the client’s machine may even be irrelevant to the programmer’s task. Network Interface Cards may have “physical addresses” and computers may be assigned IP addresses, but these are logical addresses that identify the machine on the network, not in real space. True, the network’s design may be changed to add a provision for filtering and screening for specific geographic tags in packet headers. One could, for example, instruct the machine to refuse access to requests originating from the domain “.in” (India). But one should not think of the “.in” home page as a physical home, because a person may be sitting anywhere while managing the “.in” website. The body is never in cyberspace in any practical sense, and constraints are not physical but only logical and programmable. Indeed, companies tend to distribute their resources on many machines around the world that can be seamlessly accessed by the worker without knowledge of their exact physical location. There is no consistent homology between cyberspace and physical space, except that both may be designed, integrated, and controlled through programming schemes (e.g., street planning schemes for physical space or software scripts for cyberspace). Cyberspace, even in its drastic difference, does connect and integrate physical worlds far apart, linking labor from one world to another.
There are two specific aspects of the virtual migration of software labor: spatial integration, which decouples work performance and the work site, and temporal integration, a real‐time unification of different time zones, which underscores the importance of the temporal point of the revolving and rotating earth where one is located.
The programming schemes of virtual integration do not entail transporting the body from one place to another; instead, they keep the body in one place while performance travels to other locations. Virtual labor migration is not a single scheme of integration. It may range from the real‐time work performed on mainframe computers and servers in the United States by a worker based in India to a distributed work design, allowing a firm to be geographically dispersed, without a central work station, among several sites throughout the world. Such a firm may divide up its work to take advantage of cheaper labor, diverse skills, and different time zones. Different modules of the system can be independently developed and electronically combined.
This programming labor is both an effect and cause of global integrations. On the one hand, virtual programming labor owes its origin to the transnational capitalist drive to harness cheaper skilled labor outside national borders by novel means; on the other hand, this form of labor – with universal and systems‐level programming schemes – further integrates pockets of the world by tightening the interconnectedness of labor, capital, and administration in functional supply chains. One of the project managers in New Delhi described how the managers helped the Gap to develop a new information system to track its orders and connect its globally scattered vendors: “What Gap does is, like, all their clothes are produced in the Third World, Latin America, India, Bangladesh and all these countries. They have vendors in all these places, so purchase orders are created between these vendors and Gap, and you want to purchase so many goods of a certain style, cut, size, and this order is sent out to these vendors. So, the process of automation is purchase order creation, and then getting the goods back and things like that. We were involved in the development activity. Gap had given us a complete project. We cloned their environment on our own mainframe. We … developed the complete software, and then I was in the U.S. implementing it and making changes.” Offshore programming labor thus is not merely a consequence of system imperatives. By creating software‐based programming schemes that integrate various units around the world, it is a major force behind transnational system integration. It is responsible for creating integrative spaces that ground a variety of work flows and transactions related to banking, insurance, financial services, manufacturing, retail, distribution, communications, government, transport, and hotels.
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A variety of transnational business strategies have evolved to integrate and govern dispersed labor. In many cases American companies have either entered into joint ventures with Indian companies or subcontracted part of their work to Indian companies while maintaining continuous electronic contact. A large number of Indian software professionals are connected to the mainframe computers of their American clients from a remote location, completing a series of back‐end jobs every day when the system in the United States is not as busy. Some large insurance companies in the United States that receive a huge number of claims get their processing done through such a virtual mode of spatial integration. This ability to perform work at a place other than the location of the laboring body is becoming more and more common, not only in the context of third‐party outsourcing but also among companies based in two or more locations.
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To avoid problems of coordination, Indian firms developed what was known as a 75–25 model. While 75 percent of their work force remained in India, they established a small office in the United States, comprising the remaining 25 percent of the work force, to coordinate and mediate between the Indian team and the American client. One major software company in Bombay, which also had a small unit in the United States, provided twenty‐four‐hour information systems management for insurance claims processing to a major American insurance company by accessing its mainframe computer directly from India. One programmer, who moved briefly from Bombay to North Carolina while working for the same company, described this software work as follows: “The Bombay team can directly access the client’s mainframe. Usually what we have is [a] maintenance project, and we support [the firm’s] insurance business for twenty‐four hours … There are different groups in [the firm], and [we] support most of them … So, suppose someone is claiming [insurance] money from [the insurance company] due to some accident. He would go to [the firm’s] agents, [who] would enter the data on [Customer Information Control System] screens, [inputs] like where this accident happened, what’s the cause, and other details of the accident. And when this information is entered on CICS screens and the daytime is over in the USA, that information is captured and is written to a file, which is the input for our nightly batch processing.”
[…] “There are twenty people working in the U.S. and twenty people in India,” said one CEO, describing the mechanisms of online collaboration between his team in India and its counterpart in the United States. “They are doing different things. But the mother ship is the same; it goes into the same product. So you are working on the same database, you are working on the same code. You are working on the same thing … we are sharing … a data server [and] we are working on those systems. Except for the fact that we are in India, we could be sitting across the room from those people and working.”
The phrase “sitting across the room” was not a passive statement about global connectivity; rather, it was a continuing activity that joined the discourse of integration with the continuous production and refinement of corresponding equipment and apparatus. All major companies persistently invested in installing and upgrading data communication lines that allowed for virtual work flows. The emerging labor regime depends heavily on this mode of integration, which affords a new architecture for transnational strategies of organizational governance. More and more companies are investing in direct and dedicated communication links, as reflected in the following statement of the vice‐president of another software firm in Noida, India: “Since we have a dedicated satellite, and we have paid for our lines, we are not dependent on any indirect channels; we have direct channels, if you want to speak to the U.S. I can put you through within half a minute; I don’t even have to dial the [area] codes … so that’s the kind of dedicated link I’m talking about. It’s called the link line; that’s how our server, our computers are connected.” Globalization, in view of these concrete practices, does not come across as a passive force of history or an inevitable phenomenon happening behind our backs. Rather it is enacted, implemented, and brought about through such integration schemes, resulting from the actions of high‐level executives who consciously deploy technologies of integration. […]
The speed of electronic flows brings different time zones together and connects them in real time. Work is integrated across geographies, aided by the logic of programming schemes, including information protocols that facilitate electronic flows through adaptive routing. These protocols periodically reevaluate the fastest route between two points in the network, taking stock of the current traffic in the network, broken routes, and other problems. Guided by a routing algorithm, electronic packets hop from node to node, casting the net of real time over the globe.
New organizational structures emerge. The global twenty‐four‐hour office was always the hidden possibility and agenda of all programs of globalization. Now it is a reality with which practices of business and labor management must contend. From the perspective of corporate governance, the new arrangement allows work organization in two time zones to be sequentially patterned for competitive advantage – this is called the follow‐the‐sun approach. “Basically [when] it’s night in the U.S., it’s early morning here,” a programmer in India explained. “At the end of their day [the Americans] just have to [compile] their problems and the changes they want us to do, and we can fix them in our normal working hours, fix them just in time, and it will be there next morning when they come to their office.” The corporation’s work in the United States does not stop when its employees are asleep at night, as Indian professionals keep advancing the project during their daytime. Many processing and maintenance jobs fit this model. A few American insurance companies, using this pattern, have their back‐end tasks completed in India. A programmer who worked at the time in the United States to coordinate work flow between the client and his software firm in India explained, “So, at 10:00 [p.m.] here, which will be around 8:30 in Bombay, in the morning, our daily batch cycles run … The claims that are entered in the day [in the United States] … will be processed in the nightly batch cycles in Bombay. We actually have about sixty jobs running one after the other, which update the table information.”
In cases like this one the time‐zone difference is an asset for the corporations involved: by the time offices close in the United States and night descends, software workers in India start working on the back‐end tasks during their daytime. When the CICS (computer information control system) is not in use in the United States, Indian workers can provide solutions and complete them online. When the office opens in the morning in the United States, a lot of back‐end work has already been completed, thus creating a virtual twenty‐four‐hour office for the American client. However, this new timing of organizational flows must follow the day‐and‐night pattern strictly if it is to function properly, as the team in India must finish all the tasks during their daytime. “Some of the files, which [the Bombay team and U.S. team] use, are common,” the programmer further explained, “so unless and until these files are closed, we cannot start our cycles. The CICS has to be down [before the Bombay team can start working]. Around 10:00 p.m. [Eastern Standard Time] the CICS goes down, no information can be entered after that, so our batch cycle [in Bombay] can run. And if the batch cycle is not successfully finished within time, or if it gets delayed due to some reason, then there will be a problem, because these people [in the United States] won’t be able to enter the information [in the morning]. So, it’s very critical to resolve everything [before they open their office in the United States].”
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At about eleven o’clock in the morning I reached the office of a major software firm in Gurgaon, a city that together with New Delhi and Noida forms the northern hub of software firms in India. It was April and the dreaded, rather early, north Indian summer had just set in. I had driven about twenty miles from New Delhi to interview the firm’s senior manager. The air‐conditioned interiors of the office resembled a corporate office in the United States – plush, orderly, clean, and carpeted. I always experience a culture shock at the contrast between the quiet interiors of major software firms and the outer din and disarray of Indian cities. Even from the glass opening in the door that divided the lobby from the large open office space, I could see nicely partitioned cubicles with computer monitors and phone sets. While being led to the senior manager’s office, I was struck by a rather odd and curious sight: the office and all its cubicles were totally empty. During the meeting, which was cordial and informative, I could not help asking the manager about the absence of employees in this workplace. “Oh, they will start coming in at six in the evening,” he responded nonchalantly. He explained that the empty part of the workplace that I saw was a call center, and workers were expected in the evening to start working during American office hours. Obviously the sparkling office space inside and the chronically unfinished construction work outside reflected not merely a contrast of two places, India and the United States; the two spaces were in different time zones. Transnational governance was fast overcoming the earlier CEO’s complaint about not having enough overlap with office hours in the United States, especially the West Coast. Many firms had already adapted – by working at night – to serve their clientele in the United States during their daytime, and there was no shortage of people looking for jobs that required them to adjust and synchronize their lives with regular consumer or work hours in the United States.
Technologies of virtual mobility are increasingly made to penetrate into local times, and thereby reconfigure local contexts and the social times of people’s lives. Globalization emerges as a series of different effects in different places. As physical space becomes drastically compressed by these technologies, this freshly achieved flexibility of labor supply demands certain life adjustments. People who performed nightly labor lived in two worlds. One happened during their daytime (during the major part of which they slept), marked by local languages, friendships, and relations; the other, at night, was marked by the English language as well as interactions with people living in the United States. The holidays enjoyed by the worker were those celebrated in the United States. This integration into a transnational system of labor effects a break with local mechanisms of social integration and social solidarity, by introducing what Eviatar Zerubavel calls temporal asymmetry as opposed to temporal symmetry – a temporal coordination that makes communal life possible by organizing activities in the same time frame. The importance of temporal symmetry is clear: “a most common method of punishing monks was to segregate their activities temporally from those of the rest of their community, or by having them eat their meals three hours after them, rather than together with them.” Night work in software companies is putting workers out of phase with their own society. There is a reason why night work has another name: the graveyard shift. In this graveyard of social life (or social death?), many workers seem dissatisfied and treat their jobs as a temporary phenomenon in their lives. By placing people in another time zone, programming schemes of integration enable a systematic unhinging of people’s “present” time from their concrete presence here and now, for the sake of their transpresence in another space. Spatio‐temporal integration is at once spatio‐temporal alienation. There is a high attrition rate among these workers. But demand for their services is growing at a high annual rate.
In the last few years, consumers in the United States have gradually become aware that when they call their bank’s customer service department, the phone might ring in another continent. They may or may not know that approval for a home mortgage was conveyed to them by a person sitting in Delhi, that their medical claims were assessed by someone in Gurgaon, or that calls chasing credit‐card debtors in the United States are made from Bangalore. Globalization has finally dawned on popular consciousness in a personal way. Americans are increasingly aware that that customer service agents – with friendly voices, American pseudonyms, and some training in acquiring an American accent – are telecommuting at night from India to their living rooms. Sounding “American” is important. Inauthenticity – or cultural simulation – is the very basis of authentic performance. Call‐center workers in Gurgaon may tell American customers that they are calling from an American city to put these customers at ease, since their private finances could be a matter of conversation. On their cubicles are posted large nameplates with such common American names as “Victor Smith.” Some call centers do not allow the workers to use their real names at all in this Americanized space, lest they forget their American name while talking with customers.
Economics and culture merge in capital’s effort to create a world after its own image. Workers watch Hollywood films to understand American diction and undergo speech therapy to sound “American” while also receiving at times, for the sake of ambience, coke and pizza on weekends. Software firms in India are now also getting part of their work force trained in American history and geography. Language plays an important part in the success of Indian software firms, as the considerable prevalence of English in India gives them an advantage over their competitors from non‐English‐speaking countries like China. English, a legacy of colonialism that is still used only by a small share of the population, has increased markedly since the British left India. Interestingly, colonialism was the first serious wave of transnational governance, marked by trade expansion, the administrative integration of colonies, and the spread of a few European languages, English clearly pre‐eminent among them. The programming of postcolonial globalization also needs certain unifying mechanisms, including linguistic homogeny, to tame existing incongruities and chaos. English again comes in handy. A number of institutes opened in India to train the Indian tongue in the ways of American speech, or at least neutralize the thickness of difference. It is not the success of the night labor regime that merits attention; what is of importance is the very endeavor to erase from view the disjuncture of different worlds, different time zones, different subjectivities, languages, and accents.
With a feminist twist, the Wall Street Journal claims that the “revolution” brought about by call centers is not merely economic but also cultural, challenging age‐old patriarchal values that prevented women from working at night: “As outsourced jobs pour into India, they are bringing much more than money to this nation of one billion. They are also creating a young, affluent class absorbing Western attitudes at the office, far from parental supervision. The independence of these twenty‐somethings is helping to unravel time‐honored social mores in India where young people are expected to marry someone their parents choose and live with an extended family. The idea of women working at night was unthinkable until recently.” The journalistic claims of affluence as well as women’s liberation must obviously be taken with a pinch of salt. I would not go so far as to describe call‐center workers as affluent. Unless these young workers lived with their parents, they could only hope to rent a decent apartment at the starting salary of Rs. 8,000–10,000 in places like Delhi and Bombay. Salary raises are tightly linked with the number of telephone calls that one takes so that the targets set for one’s team can be met, and the number can reach the incredibly high number of 250–300 calls a night. Still, one cannot call such practices oppressive in the regular sense of the term. The jobs are sources of income for this group of relatively young workers. Call‐center work may also reflect a fascination with things American and may not be immediately perceived as oppressive or imperialistic by the workers. True, there was no desire on the part of the workers interviewed to continue in their jobs forever. Most of them left within a year. Even as a researcher, I could not spend the whole night observing work. Permanent night shifts, exceedingly high call targets, and such health problems as insomnia, weight loss, stress, and declining eyesight were some of the reasons why employees did not stay on their jobs for long.
[…] In virtual migration, the ever‐growing subordination of the social to the economic acquires global dimensions, as this surrender of social life to the economic system can literally take place across the globe.
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