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Created: September 3, 2003
Latest Update: September 3, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

CitiBank and Bank of America and Middle-Class Jobs

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, September 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.

On Tuesday, September 2, 2003 Lawrence Gray shared with us his reactions to a KCET program on how jobs, middle class jobs, are leaving the country at the rate of, I believe Lawrence said, half a million last year. The two companies on which the program focused were Citicorp, the largest bank of all, and Bank of America.

As Lawrence described it, the banks are outsourcing the training of some of their regular employees for computer training. In Outsourcing, they send their employees to Company PDQ, who contracts for the task of training them in some new technology. Then, several months later, Company PDQ has to downsize because the job situation changed and these newly trained workers will no longer be needed. When the workers return to complain to the banks, the bank claim innocence, and nothing they can do. It was Company PDQ that made that decision, not the banks.

But, as Lawrence put it, there's more. People are being paid to teach workers in Bombay, Amercian culture, American hip-hop slang, so that when you make a call to find out why your deposit hasn't been posted, there is someone on the other end of the line to chat with you, and you think you're talking to the kid next door, when actually you're talking to someone in Bombay, India. Deceit. Intentional? Why work so hard to imitate American accents and American cultural events? Why not acknowledge that the jobs have moved to Bombay? Who is deceived? and Why? And is such deceit ethical? moral? And now we're back to the aesthetic process of answerability. If Americans do not realize how many of these jobs have left the company does the organization disappearing the jobs have to be answerable. Monologic non-answerability? Is there no answerability in the cost of doing business? Or is the middle class the next group of indigenous peoples to go?

Ah, the world grows more and more complex, and the red monster of greed slithers more smoothly through our presence. The bombay workers are cheaper than similarly trained American workers.

Stories like this make me want to cry or slay the red dragon, but slaying the red dragon usually wins out. Let's face it, crying doesn't do anything but relieve stress. And what we need here is to demand that our voices be heard somewhere that counts. And we can. There are large groups of professionals who have learned how to help developing countries gain both voice and control in their lives. White's Participatory Video, Introduction. If we can help developing countries learn to develop empowerment, we can certainly help ourselves to learn it, in our own local communities. Here is a whole new area opening to sociologists, and it's going to require whole new sets of tools and understandings. But the future lies here. So don't go off discouraged; go off determined to understand and commit to the need for social change and social justice right here at home.