“This controversy (over call centers) recently broke out in an unlikely place, the letters column of the Times Literary Supplement. After Susan Sontag praised Indians for putting their English-language skills to work through call centres, a furious professor in New Delhi denounced her for failing to see that ‘These poor young men and women are indeed the cyber-coolies of our global age.’ In the next issue, another Delhi resident wrote that what the professor considers exploitation looks to workers like a way to acquire skills as well as income. He acknowledged that while ‘it isn’t much fun to persuade someone in Detroit to pay his credit card bill’ (yet another function of call centres), it builds negotiating skills.

It is an iron law of international economics that the Exploitation Police will swoop down and denounce anyone who creates new jobs, particularly in relatively poor areas. The common complaint is that call-centre companies set up shop in places (New Brunswick is a good example) where they can find well-educated workers at relatively low wages. The Exploitation Police make this sound almost criminal. In fact, it’s the way capitalism has always expanded and the way that poor regions have traditionally turned themselves into less poor regions. To consider this sort of change deplorable is to miss the fact that business lives by ingenuity and perishes when it ceases to find new and cheaper ways to get its work done.” —National Post