Racism is No Answer to Outsourcing

Filed in archive Outsourcing News on January 27, 2005

Last December, A WUSL-FM DJ, Troi Torain, played a recording of a prank call to a hair bead company. In the recorded call, Torain verbally attacked an Indian call-center worker. The Philadelphia DJ presented himself as a customer who wanted to get hair beads for his daughter. When he knew that he reached an Indian call center, he then said, "Listen to me, you dirty rat-eater, I'll come out there and choke the eff out of you.'' And when the Indian operator tried to diffuse the situation the DJ replied, "Don't get slick with the mouth... How dare you outsource my call?''

The morning broadcast drew few complaints, but after the call was posted on WUSL's website, people were outraged. The recorded call spread through blogs, emails, and eventually, in a story by the Philadelphia Inquirer. The station then apologized, removed the clip from its website, and suspended Torain and his DJ sidekick, Timothy Joseph.

But the damage has been done. Amlan Chatterjee, a San Jose software engineer said, "Any civilized person, any person who had a normal upbringing and had loving parents, a loving family, would be hurt by what they were doing." Chaterjee understands the frustration of American workers losing jobs to outsourcing, but does not understand the reaction. He defended the call center worker by saying, "That person just came to do their job."

News writer Mike Cassidy wrote that the incident might be an extreme example of the growing sentiment against outsourcing in the US. But already, there are on-line campaigns to harass call-center workers. For him, the answer to this frustration is not hate. He stated that the US should educate the next generation of technologists, and give support to those who lose jobs because of outsourcing.

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