Written Assignment – Unit 1 – POLS1503 – Term 4
For this assignment, you will choose two case studies from the four available in the following resource:
United Nations Association. (2014). The Global Citizen Student Reader: Globalization. Retrieved from: www.unausa.org.
The cases are as follows:
1) Mexican Government Advises Migrants (page 9)
2) Liberian Plantation Workers Allege Poor Conditions (page 10)
3) Charities Hijacked by Terrorism? (page 11)
4) Call Center Jobs, Once Offshored to India, Now Offshored from India (page 12)
After you choose two, and carefully read through each one, the following questions must be answered for each case study:
• How, in each case, did globalization change some people’s lives? How did …show more content…
Technology permitted outsourcing call-center jobs from high-developed countries such as Great Britain and the United States to less developed such as India. In this way, companies could have improved their benefits, spending less for their workers (wages in India are sensibly lower than western countries) and Indians on their part could have improved their lifestyles thanks to call-center salaries that were higher than those for other jobs. Despite on what one may think, conflicts didn’t raise from thoughts like: “International outsourcing […] has become a scourge of workers in the developed world, who are losing jobs on a large scale to competition from lower-cost workers abroad” (Porter, 2004) but, instead, from real and rude behaviors of racism. Customers (or potential ones) didn’t want to talk to Indians, they complain their typical accent, they address them as terrorists, and so on.
In order to avoid this attitude, on a primary moment, companies tried to neutralize their operators’ accent, paying them specific schools and encouraging them watching English or American television. After a while, obviously, for more remunerative return, they decided to decentralize their call centers to the Philippines. Here, they could count on a based English preparation, an already widespread English/American culture, and accent, through school and television, even whether salaries were a bit higher than Indians