I began my day with stress. I needed to handle some financial matters, and dealing with these things is always stressful for me. I began by attempting to handle them online… I ran into a slew of problems related to the fact that my name change had not been processed correctly since I got married; so I would have to make several phone calls in order to fix the account and then take care of the original problem. The part that I dreaded was the part where I had to either deal with representatives located overseas or else request to speak with representatives based in the United States. In conversations with this company in the past, I have been politely assured that it is always my right to speak with a representative in the U.S. However, I have since learned that this does not apply to all companies who outsource their call center work. Some representatives have angrily claimed that they don’t have the ability to transfer my call or even hung up on me when I requested a transfer.
The question has always been heavy on my mind: does my preference for speaking to U.S.-based call center representatives about my financial matters make me a racist? I will speak to them about my computer products, work with them as medical professionals, etc. But when dealing with my financial matters, I want to speak to someone who can communicate clearly in my language and who has intimate knowledge of my country’s financial system. What does that say about me? Is there a fine line between discriminating and discrimination?
As soon as the overseas call center representative picked up my call, I asked to be transferred state-side. The person was very nice and transferred me, apologizing and saying it was an “accident.” I felt worse at that point and wanted to just take it back… It wasn’t his fault, and it probably wasn’t an accident. The calls are probably routed overseas by default in order to save money. That is something I blame on the corporate entities; and shame on them for their greed! It is worker exploitation; and why is that ok? It is tangled–he probably needs the job desperately. But this is not the best solution–for anybody. The discomfort–for both of us–was palpable over the phone line. As a society, we can’t keep looking the other way while corporations profit and everybody loses. We have lost our own jobs while the companies handling our affairs are hiring overseas workers at wages we would never accept, to take on emotional abuses we would never tolerate from each other, for their own gain. At the least, we should care enough about ourselves to insist these companies start hiring at home. At the most, every worker deserves to be able to do a job where they are treated with respect and dignity. Outsourcing does not afford overseas workers that opportunity–unless we who are calling consciously give the workers respect and dignity.
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