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Customer
Service Organising Month |
Download
Call Centre Newsletter Nr. 1, 2004 Circular Action 2004: Raising the standards
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"Quality jobs - Quality services" Outsourcing
and Offshoring of customer service jobs Trade
unions’ first duty is to their members, and nothing comes higher on the
list of priorities than defending members’ jobs and livelihoods when they
are under threat. Unions will therefore want to find the most effective
tools possible to use when jobs are under threat of migration.
On
the other hand, appropriate tactics need to be matched with a strategic
sense of longer-term economic trends. As
companies globalise their operations, there will be increasing pressure at
least for lower-skilled knowledge-based jobs to shift from higher-wage to
lower-wage areas. A failure to understand this process may mean that unions
embrace tactics which don’t work. It
is also arguably deceitful to members for unions not to fully explain these
realities to them. UNI
has an obvious responsibility in working with its affiliates directly
affected by the threat of work migration, in bringing together trade unions
at both potential ends of the process. Global framework agreements are one
way to ensure that employment and organising rights are adequately defended
in developing countries. One
encouraging sign in relation to India is that young IT professionals there,
including those working in the call centre industry, have successfully
established – with UNI help – their own representative organisations in
Bangalore, Hyderabad, and a number of other IT centres in India.
The IT Professionals Forums in the provinces of Andhra Pradesh and
Karnataka held inaugural conferences in February 2003, and both these bodies
(whilst still very much fledgling organisations) are now UNI affiliates. Go to UNI's webpage on Outsourcing / Offshoring Contact |
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