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Sunday, September 30, 2007 - (see all news for this day)
'people of colour'?? - 08:01 AM
(filed under 'general')
i was just reading an article about how many companies these days are outsourcing their customer service to lower income countries such as india & the philippines.
while i agree with how it can be frustrating to try to communicate effectively with someone who doesn't speak your language as their first language—& how they're often trained in only in the most basic rudiments of the issue that you're trying to solve (which is no fault of the person on the end of the phone. they're simply doing their job as best as they can)—what struck me most about the article was how the author used the term 'people of color [sic]'.
he wrote, 'I realize that a call for a ban on outsourcing customer service may seem racist. After all, the folks with these outsourced jobs are largely people of color whose first language is not English. Isn't this proposal thinly veiled discrimination against non-U.S. cultures?'
is it racist? well, no, unless you're actually calling them people of colour!! do people seriously still use that phrase? surely that went out shortly after slavery did! firstly, he seems to be assuming that anyone who's white speaks english as a first language. i guess he's never heard of europe. secondly, what difference does it make if they're dark? it's got nothing to do with his argument as to why the customer service is notoriously poor. he could leave that phrase out completely & his sentence would make as much sense: 'After all, the folks with these outsourced jobs are largely people whose first language is not English.'
i totally agree with how annoying it is when big companies outsource their customer service jobs, but by crikey, what a way to say it!
sounds like a bigoted article. from here, i think the general feeling of outsourcing is that it takes away from local jobs. its believed that the outsourcing is just a big companies way of saving money.
that is a bit fubared. the colour of your skin has no direct bearing on what language you speak!
but the outsourcing to people who don't speak english or else don't speak it very well is very frustrating. i have noticed that they've now been told to say "please don't hang up, i'm not trying to sell you anything." (no, you're going to tell me i was SPECIALLY selected for an AMAZING offer!) of course, i hang up. for one i'm not interested in whatever shit they aren't selling and for two, i have little enough time without having to waste it trying to cut through a thick accent and bad grammar for something i'm not interested in. no, it's not the fault of those people, they are being exploited, but it still doesn't mean i need to listen to them.
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Last weekend Jade and I saw this. In our subsequent discussions about whether it was racist or not, we both said that we didn't even think of that picture as being of an *asian* girl. She was just a girl!
Some people must really see the world through odd coloured glasses if they see race as such an important factor!