Linguistic sweatshops

By Dr Tariq Rahman
Like sweatshops the world over the call centres of Pakistan are the new sites for the extension of globalised capitalist market practices and the ideology which underlies them. –File Sweatshops exist because workers in poor countries take lower wages to do the same kind of labour as their counterparts in developed, postindustrial societies. Corporate investors can get their products manufactured cheaply and sell these at a much higher price with their brand name.

Call centres are also based on this basic principle. They exist because the rapid development in communications, especially the telephone and Internet, make it possible to communicate all over the globe virtually almost without any time lag.

What makes them exist and multiply is their contribution to maximising profits of corporate giants. As wages for call centre employees are higher in the US and Europe it is cheaper for entrepreneurs there to hire workers in Asia who are paid a lower wage.
Call centres perform two functions: they receive calls from abroad, providing services to western customers, or, they call clients in western countries to sell them goods and services (outgoing).

Pakistani call centre workers are referred to as Customer Services Representatives (CSRs). They try to adopt either an American or a British accent when they interact with foreigners on the telephone in their daily work.

Most call centres have business dealings with America. Clearly it is the American accent which serves as linguistic capital for call centre workers since it can be sold in the market for a job with higher wages than would ordinarily be available to young people of their age in Pakistan.

The situation is akin to the days of British colonialism when people aspired to ‘received pronunciation’ (RP) — or ‘Oxbridge’ as it was sometimes called in India. They were appropriately called ‘brown sahibs.’ A response of dominated groups everywhere is to accept the norms, values, tastes, cultural and linguistic superiority, etc., of the dominant group voluntarily, according to Italian philosopher and political theorist Antonio Gramsci.

Linguistic ideology makes us believe that certain languages and accents are superior to others. This determines our attitudes and it is in the context of linguistic attitudes that the linguistic policies and practices of call centres should be understood.

First, a number of young people acquire the desired foreign accent of English which they call the ‘neutralisation of accent.’ Within call centres there are advertisements of trainers claiming to conduct ‘accent neutralisation courses’ ranging from a few weeks to three months. In the hall where the calls are received and made there are notices proclaiming an ‘English only’ policy.

Secondly, the employees have to use foreign names and not disclose their location. I noticed that nobody I interviewed thought there was anything wrong about discouraging the speaking of Urdu and other Pakistani languages in the call centres nor did anybody complain about hiding the true names and places of work of the agents.

The language ideology behind such kinds of practices is a subset of that of English in the rest of society. The British-American pronunciation is valued to the exclusion of all other pronunciations of Pakistani English. This alienates call centre employees from other speakers. The fact that it may not be such an important issue for other speakers of English results in greater distance.

However, the call centres are so few that their workers’ thoughts do not affect society as a whole. They cannot impose their linguistic ideology on anyone. They can only look down on other users of Pakistani English in private.

Call centres are generally situated in modern, glass-and-metal glittering buildings with modern furniture and ample lighting. Security is tight and access to the CSRs is controlled by managers and other administrative cadres. Call centres are a replica, or perhaps a shadow, of life in the US. The lights turn the night into day — the day in the US and Britain. There are four clocks on the wall giving the four American time zones. Young people, mostly boys in T-shirts and jeans speak in an American accent which, in some cases, is obviously affected.

Their body language is also like that of Americans. They have ‘mimicked’ it. The whole atmosphere is pseudo-American with people addressing each other with American-sounding pseudonyms and using greetings like ‘hi’ and ‘bye’ and ‘I am good.’ I could not find any resistance to the idea that their identity was being managed and, in fact, they themselves chose to represent an alien identity through pronunciation and pseudonyms.

Like sweatshops the world over the call centres of Pakistan are the new sites for the extension of globalised capitalist market practices and the ideology which underlies them.

They create a virtual reality in which language, accent, names, locations and identities in a hegemonic centre (America) are invested with value which is exchanged for money. However, the process entails greater acquiescence in discourses of western hegemony and alienation from one’s own cultural reality.

The employees accept the philosophy of work, opportunity and business so well that they do not realise that they are being colonised in ways much more drastic and far-reaching than ever before.

Their agency is reduced in the name of efficiency and standardisation and even their time is colonised and reversed. As most of them accept this colonisation, they support global capital and represent themselves as agents of a homogenising and westernising ideology which is privileged by the expansion of the free market all over the world.

Though alienated from their own cultures, the workers of call centres do, nevertheless, form part of a global workforce which lives in perpetual exile having cut itself off from the roots of its identity. The very existence of this kind of labour force marks all things western (American) as being ‘normal’ and, therefore, legitimises capitalism as the natural condition of existence.


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