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Age Discrimination, Indian-Style
theodp writes "In April, IBM CEO Samuel Palmisano told investors Big Blue hopes to dodge an estimated $6 billion in liability stemming from a judge's ruling that IBM violated U.S. federal age discrimination laws. In May, IBM closes on its $150-$200MM purchase of Indian outsourcer Daksh, whose age requirements for job applicants make Logan's Run seem progressive. On its Opportunities page, Daksh states that Customer Care Specialists should be between 21-25 years of age and Team Leaders should be no older than 27. Early Daksh investors included Citigroup and we-don't-need-no-stinking-unions Amazon."
Why do they want to make the age requirement public? This can be discretely discussed with the HR department and just filter anyone over xx age out automatically.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
1] People start to work and have kids at an earlier age in India, by ensuring people are between certain ages, you ensure they will be with the company a long time.
2] More resources on age descrimination
It is NOT because younger people are smarter or brighter than older people. That's true. I think it would be safe to assume that older people would have more applicable experience and be more effective at the job. I think another assumption usually made is that younger people are sharper and more on the ball. But then again, that's just a typical stereotype as well.
This poses a problem if they want younger crowds as the life expectancy in India is less compared to other countries See here
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
Which is why when jobs are outsourced like this to circumvent American worker protections, the products of such labor (or the gross, in case of service businesses) should be heavily taxed.
Another proud carrier of the $rtbl flag
If you want cheap tech support that just reads a script and you're supporting Some Random Game or How To Use Instant Messenger Brand X, then you probably aim for young, cheap people you can easily manipulate and strongarm into hard work, harder hours and little pay or other compensation with the false expectation that hard work pays off in corporations and doesn't just get you laid off when you are promoted into a position that they can no longer afford to keep.
However, if you are supporting mission critical software or hardware for a company with very expensive ($100k +) support contracts who expect reliable, professional, top-notch, respectable, hard-working employees who take sick days only when they're really sick and can be expected to return a page immediately and be on call like a responsible adult, you hire people with proven industry experience.
I work in such an environment and I'm almost the youngest person in our huge (thousands globally) support division at the age of 28. Almost everyone else is in their 30s, 40s and 50s. Almost all have college degrees plus five or more years of experience and many have masters degrees.
I've received quotes from Indian outsourcing companies where they could supply a staff of people who spoke (a) brittish, (b) southern/texas, and (c) american/california accents, and promised they'd adjust their style to match the caller.
They also quoted rates for having the staff read the local newspaper of key markets so they could make appropriate comments about the weather, ball games, etc.
This service was much more expensive than the competitor's heavy-indian accent bid, though.
Yes--any country has the right and the duty to attempt to avoid the circumvention of its employment laws. The best way to effect this is to hit said companies in the pocketbook. The next step in the escalation is that the capital leaves the country--but then, tarrifs can be employed to keep the fruits of exploited labor out.
Another proud carrier of the $rtbl flag
I didn't know why they consider blood type as a hiring factor, so I found this:
Personality assessment through blood type analysis has been prevalent in Japan sine the early 1970's. The Japanese term for this theory is 'ketsu-eki-gata', and is taken surprisingly seriously by the people from that part of the world. Books have been published on the topic, selling very well. In fact, Toshitaka Nomi has published over twenty-five books, and is considered the worlds leading expert on the topic. The blood type categories are used in a similar way to astrology in the west, focusing mostly on relationship aspects of life. Nomi goes further in his books though, even using blood type make up within a country as a theory for that nationality's general national traits.
Japanese companies often take blood type into consideration when hiring employees, to ensure harmony throughout the staff. All the major car companies in Japan have reorganised themselves in order to attain positive blood type combinations in different working sectors. Surveys have been carried out to try and determine the preferences of different blood types, be it for food, clothes or any recreational activity. It is also a popular topic of conversation in social settings.
More can be found here.
The unemployment rate in India is huge and the young workers comprise the bulk of the population, as they age, the laws will catch up. Remember america was built by immigrants and returning WWII soldiers who didn't have much of the same protections.. as these workers age the social constructs will catch up with them as well.
This reminds me of the uproar when kids in Bavaria were being taught "television-german" instead of the good honest Bavarian dialect.
His neutral accent sounded just like the "generic white guy" from any movie.
Actually it is quite common in India and Pakistan . You see job ads that explicitly list an age and that require you to furnish a recent picture!!!!. I mean imagine this "ABC Ltd. require a developer with skills in X, Y, and Z. The applicant must be below the age of 30. Please send your resume with two recent photographs to XXXX".
One of the most hilarious things that I saw was when a research institute that is "...committed to organising professional research, policy studies, and seminars in the area of human development." placed a job ad on their website stating that the applicant needs to be below the age of 25 . If a body that does research in human development and should know better engages in such practices, what is to be expected of others. Oh well, I am glad I am out of that mess.
Frankly, in some industries, you're too young. I cut my teeth (as a teenager) on a KIM-1 and what I remember about the VIC20/ZX80 crowd is you're afraid of hardware.
We use to refer to you lot as the "appliance computer users".
I've found my familiarty with hardware/electronics to be an EXTREME asset in the embedded market.
plurvert
Intelligence isn't dependant on age, no. Experience is. The rate experience is acquired varies from person to person, but nobody is born with it. Part of the reason for the magical number 18 may be that that is when you're supposed to finish public school, and therefore you should have a minimum knowledge of history, civics, economics, etc.
In the seven years since I finished college, if anything I have forgotten a lot of what I learned. But, I have learned a whole lot of things about how the real world works. Am I more or less intelligent now? No. But I am more worldly, and can vote much more intelligently, and make more intelligent decisions otherwise, because of experience.
As for testing whether people are "ready", do you really want the government to start up another beurocracy to manage that? More money, more arbitrary decision making, more government control.
The other problem is fairness. In the current system, everyone is treated equally ("all men are created equal..."). What criterion do you use to decide when someone is ready? Intelligence? Knowledge? Income? It'd be nice to say "maturity", but that can't be tested directly. Any criteria you choose will slant towards some people, and not others. It will then be manipulated to slant towards those in power.
It may not be ideal, but at least the current system is fair.
NPR did a good story on it in December. If you don't like using ears, Fortune covered it too.
Paying offshore workers much less than American workers would make for the same job isn't necessarily exploitation. The "low" salaries really depend on perspective. For example, a call center worker in India makes more money than a doctor does.
the gini coefficient measures the degree of inequality in income distribution (based on the Lorenz curve) [google knows all]. Sweden: 25 / USA: 41 (where 0 is equal distribution / 100 is completely unequal)
Sweden vs. USA ; USA has more libertarian values than Sweden but has much more equitable wealth distribution; given that the standard of living for Sweden and USA is roughly the same, this means the "little guy" does better in Sweden than USA contrary to your assertion (there are many more examples and none seem to confirm your viewpoint)
I never understood age descrimination. I've always sort of assumed that even in fast changing fields like high tech that experience would be a good thing.
If its because the older workers get paid more and won't work for less money then its a pay issue and not really an age discrimination issue. If you wan't the job that badly work for less; nobody owes you anything.
And before you think its just so much easier for us youngsters...
Age descrimination works both ways. I worked for a couple years in California at an orgization that would match 12% (Yes, 12) of your pay and put it in a 401K for you but they wouldn't do this for you if you were under 21. Thats age discrimination and apperently its perfectly legal.
Oh...Yeah, did I mention how much more us youngsters have to pay for our car insurance even if we have a clean record?
Or that the cost of college compared to the average income has skyrocketed making it much more expensive for us to get an education.
Or that the cost of a house compared to the average income has also been steadily increasing making it more expensive to get a foot in the door and buy a house.
Or that even with all of the above those of us starting out have to pay a higher percentage of our income in taxes making it harder for us to save up enough to put a down payment on a house.
Or how we have to pay tons of money into social security (a much higher percentage than previous generations) even though its possible (probable?) that we'll never see any of that back.
So I'm jump'n up and down screaming show me the money.
Posting anon for obvious reasons. (This is about EDS, BTW.)
>The only trouble for young people is how do you
>prove you were fired by your boss on that ground
>in court.
Tell me about it. I got screwed by a call center (only work I could get) here after I got cancer. My supervisor told me that I was taking too much time off for appointments with my oncologist and should quit if I needed that much time.
They didn't fire me, but they started screwing with my hours (I just can't do 12 hours a day regularly) and throwing red tape on the forms for the insurance company's compensation for the time I was off post-surgery. (I didn't ask for pay for the days of my oncologist visits, just for the two weeks after the surgery. Only thing they were losing during my appointments was one warm body.)
Before long it was so intolerable that I quit. The breaking point was when my supervisor followed me into the men's room, then stood outside my stall and started asking me why I didn't provide an excuse form listing the reason why I wasn't on the phones two of my scheduled hours from the previous week. Oh, I don't know, maybe I was trying to take a crap or something!
Another guy was quietly let go when he had to switch from cheaper (and nonworking) meds to expensive ones.
As an Indian I am happy to see this topic being discussed.
When I worked in India 10 years ago, it was common to see such ads. Some companies also asked for your marital status, the number of kids you have, and your driver's license number. There was no option but to provide this information.
Some pressure on them to discontinue such practices would be good.
When you have so *much* talent to draw from, from a pool of a billion, it must become very easy to just treat them like a commodity... to use them for what they're worth and then toss them aside when you're done with them... sort of the "low wage" syndrome (like call centers) here in the states - they work for nothing and there are a 100 people who will replace them - in fact there are 5 people being trained right now for when you get sick of it and quit, do you honestly give a crap about them as a manager? no. Humans are notoriously bad at managing surplus. Scarcity, we do pretty good with.. we even invent whole bodies of knowledge to manage it (economics).. Surplus? We have no idea what to do with it, and so we waste it. Now, I'm not exactly happy about offshoring, but I feel that, from the world-level-view, this sort of behavior is counter productive.
meh
I could probably deal with accents a lot better if two things would happen:
1. Slow down. The performance metric that says that the faster you handle a call is done without consideration for the customer
2. Stop that infernal beeping. I don't know what that is - something telling me they're recording the conversation or something, but when a conversation has every fourth word bleeped out it's hard to understand, especially if they're asking important questions I may have to pay for.
Josh
Part of the attractiveness of the Philippines for outsourcing is that there are many tens of thousands of college graduates either unemployeed or underemployed (architects doing ditch-digging, engineers pumping gas, nurses working as secretaries, etc. and even more living with family unable to find work) The literacy rate in the Philippines is nearly the same as the US, probably with a higher per-capita college degree rate.
IMNSHO, much of this is caused by the Catholic Church (yes, I was raised Catholic and attended Catholic grad school) which has prevented meaningful population control (divorce is still illegal but largely ignored via separation as de facto divorce and mistresses/affairs, and until Aquino condoms and birth control were quasi-illegal; previously available due presence of US bases only). The islands have limited natural resources, insufficient for the population levels. The church still routinely tells people every sunday to "go forth and multiply; God will provide". Rubbish unless poverty, early death and misery are what you had in mind for "providing".
The other element is corruption. Even Cory Aquino exempted her own family land holdings when land reform was forced upon all the other major wealthy land owners under her adminstration. The US has just as much corruption only we have institutionalized it as campaign contributions and PACS which helps to limit the scope and obviousness. You are not blatantly asked for bribes trying to get government or commercial services, but the option is available in the US through the right channels.
It's an eye-opening experience to spend time in a developing nation - most our current national (US) stupidity is perpetrated by people who have obviously never done so. Hopefully our Christian Taliban doesn't get the chance to take the US there.