DEALING WITH DISCRIMINATION AND RACIAL SEGREGATION TARGETED AT CALL CENTRE EMPLOYEES

As boundary-spanners performing emotional labour via virtual mode in India's international-facing call centers, agents often face abuse from their overseas customers. Such misbehaviour goes beyond aversive racism to include economic, dispositional, situational and sexual dimensions. Not only do employer organizations and clients, in pursuit of competitive advantage, adopt service level agreements that constrain employee agency in responding to customer aggression but socio ideological controls, performance measures and customer feedback also pose significant limits. Agents are defenseless against these three powerful stakeholders, particularly because of the North-South dynamics within which global production networks operate. Adopting emotion-focused coping strategies to deal with their experiences, agents make pragmatic choices that further their long-term interests while maintaining their value systems. In addition to extending the workplace bullying literature through a focus on extra-organizational/external bullying, employer-driven interventions promoting ethical workplaces are suggested as means to address the issue