Catherwood LibraryILR School

In a growing business trend, many large Western companies including General Electric, British Airways, American Express and Amazon.com are moving their service centers to India, where labor can be 70 percent cheaper. Customer service calls are channeled 8,000 miles away through fast fiber-optic cables to a company representative trained to speak with an American or British accent. The companies praise the native Indian workers who are well educated, polite, and speak excellent English but labor activists and intellectuals brand this new globalization trend a white-collar sweatshop and warn that it is a step towards wiping out native culture.