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Outsourcing Unit To Be Set Up In Indian Jail
littlekorea writes "Indian outsourcing firm Radiant Info Systems has found yet another way to lower wages — hiring data entry clerks from a local prison. Some 200 inmates will be paid $2.20 a day to handle manual data entry tasks for Radiant's BPO deals in a pilot for the scheme. Radiant execs told the BBC that the deal will provide skills to inmates when they are released from prison. No doubt they would also be due for a pay raise." They're going to need to cut wages if they want to be competitive with the 100,000 US prisoners who work for 25 cents an hour.
I'm sick to death of calling into some company for support and struggling mightily to understand the person on the other end.
I realize that English is not these folks primary language, and for it being ESL for them, they do a good job. But when I call in for support to a company "based in the US", damnit, I expect to hear a US voice.
Except that a "US voice" doesn't necessarily help.
I've called technical support lines and gotten someone with an impossibly thick southern drawl before. At least that's what I assume it was. Maybe they were drunk. Regardless, it was clear that they were from the southern US, but I couldn't understand half of what they were saying.
Why is a clear speaking voice not a requirement for these positions?
I don't care where you're located geographically, as long as you can speak clearly.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
Not really a joke. Post civil war, that's basically what they did to get the newly emancipated back in their place, where possible. All sorts of crimes ("vagrancy") and the like, heavy enforcement against the undesirables, and then lease the resulting convicts out as cheap slave labor to various upstanding local businesses.
All perfectly legal and above board.
These days, of course, we have the private, for-profit prison, a truly brilliant institution. The outfits that run these are very reliable "law-and-order" lobbyists, and there was even a case a while back where they were paying a judge a per-inmate kickback for, shall we say, "referrals"...