Year: 2018
Type: book
Abstract: In 2006 an unsettling event took place in my extended family.One of my young cousins in the Philippines, a nursing school graduate on the verge of obtaining her license and thus the chance to live and work in the United States, disappeared from home.As an adolescent, Jocelyn had been known for somewhat impetuous behavior; still, everyone worried.Weeks later, Jocelyn phoned her mother -a widow with three younger children -to let her know that she was safe, living on a neighboring island, and had gotten a job in a call center answering outsourced customer service calls for a U.S.-based cable company.The pay, she explained, was substantial.At ₱15,000 per month, she was earning more money than her peers who worked in fields like accounting or architecture, and although she was assigned overnight shifts, she had also made a lot of friends and could afford to rent a small apartment with three other women.Jocelyn also informed her mother that she would not be taking the nursing board exams as planned, because she did not want to migrate to the United States as many women in our family had done before her.In this way, my cousin's actions had emotional and financial repercussions of transnational proportions.Poor and without work, Jocelyn's mother had long relied on the remittances of her sisters-in-law living in America -the nurses whose path Jocelyn was expected to follow -and indeed Jocelyn's education and all her living expenses had been paid for with money these women sent back home with the expectation that, once working full time, Jocelyn on her own would provide for her mother and siblings.It was, as many in our family would say, her turn.After the smoke from our little scandal cleared, I began to wonder about the job my cousin had taken as a call center agent.What did it entail?Why was she so drawn to it, despite our family's potential disapproval and her other options?And what did it mean that Jocelyn, who did not migrate to the United States for work, ended up employed by a U.S. corporation and serving Americans on the phone every night anyhow?A few months later, while spending the summer living in Metro Manila, I realized that Jocelyn's story was not at all unique.All around me, I saw young, college-educated, and English-fluent Filipinos eagerly lining up for jobs in the country's hottest new workplaces, where 1 -800 numbers connect customer service and technical support agents like my cousin and her friends to homes and offices across America, as well as in England, Australia, and New Zealand.Tucked away in highly securitized office buildings and tethered to headsets and desktop computers, call center employees book airline reservations, troubleshoot wireless routers, or track insurance claims -all in the so-called neutral or light accents for which Filipinos are often known in the industry and beyond.Catering to customers in Western time zones, transnational call center work in the Philippines extends from dusk to dawn, cutting workers off from the normal rhythms of social life and fortifying not only their camaraderie but also the new night culture that surrounds them.It did not take long for me to see that, in this former U.S. colony, call centers are a story with national and global proportions.Call center work takes place in office spaces, often quite large, where employees stationed at individual cubicles answer or make calls and queries on behalf of companies or corporations; such interactions can involve customer service, technical support, telemarketing, or debt collection.In the late 1990s, U.S.based firms began outsourcing this work offshore to Asia, starting a competition among developing countries for jobs in global services.From a few hundred employees in 1997, the Philippine call center industry had expanded to 20,000 "seats" or positions by 2004 and then multiplied twelve times in a mere two years, reaching 240,000 employees by 2006.By 2011 the Philippines had surpassed India -a country with more than eight times the productive capacity -to become what a New York Times reporter referred to as "the call center capital of the world." 1 As 2015 came to a close, the industry counted 1.1 million people in direct employment and $22 billion in revenue -approximately 7.5 percent of the country's gross domes-Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.
Source: Duke University Press eBooks
Author: Jan M. Padios
Language: English
Topic: Migration and Labor Dynamics
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Funder: University of California, Davis
OpenAlex ID: W2801961566