Where the Customer is Second
American businesses compete with each other trying to please the customer. Every employee is constantly reminded that the customer is right, no matter what. So one gets used to being greeted with a smile as you enter, have questions answered courteously and promises kept.
In the part of India I am from, Kerala, things are definitely different. It is the employee who is King here. The customer must wait for his attention. The manager of any business is beholden to his employees and is not paid much more than the average worker.
This is partly because of the left wing politics that dominates this region: Kerala was the first place in the world where Communists came to power through elections. Every industry is dominated by trade unions who can frustrate any manager who crosses them. It is the union bosses,professional politicians all, who run the show. Machiavelli noted that politics is the only field of human activity which sets its own rules; every one else has to abide by rules set ultimately by the politicians. No where is this more true than in Kerala.
You would think that such a place is doomed to economic failure. Yet Kerala is booming now, reversing a trend that goes back to before the British times. The unemployment that used to plague even the highly educated has all but disappeared. Land values are soaring, luxury hotels are springing up like mushrooms. High Tech companies are starting to move in to avoid the congestion of Bangalore and the heat of Chennai. There is widespread primary education, making the claim of one hundred percent literacy-astounding by Indian standards- almost believable.
Most people from around here used to have to seek employment and higher education elsewhere, but that is changing too. Privately financed professional colleges are starting up, training energetic and hard working young people. Luxury hotels originally constructed originally for foreign tourists are getting filled instead with uncouth young men working for various software companies.
I am watching a group of them eat iddlys, chatting loudly with their mouths full, the sambar dribbling down their chin. They are talking about the intricacies of some kind of software for accounting (Tally?). Tourists come to Kerala to take pictures of the waterfalls and beaches. But these guys grew up next to those beaches. They are taking pictures in the lobby of the hotel with the artificial fountain in the background: that is what is new to them. These are the people taking some of the jobs disappearing from the US. While their table manners may be atrocious, they possess a combination of mathematical, accounting and computing skills that is hard to beat. Certainly at the wages they are willing to work for. Most have degrees in physics or mathematics, have taken some training course in the software they use and are quite good programmers. They are paid less than the software engineers who are the true stars of the Indian economic boom. Even though they are not quite IIT material, they are smart enough to run the back office functions of many midsize and large American firms. What they lack in sophistication they make up in ability. Perhaps you don’t need to know that 1985 is a good year for Chateau Margaux to be a really good accountant. All that wine snobbery is probably a way to hide technical incompetence in any case. The egalitarian culture of Kerala could well be an advantage in a world with few barriers. Time will tell.
But many problems remain here. Politicians continue to bicker while garbage piles up on the very street where the State Government is situated. There is a mysterious, occasionally even deadly, viral fever going around that scares the bejeesus out of every foreign visitor. The even more deadly virus of caste politics is still alive through a quota system for Government jobs, which ironically, is meant to eradicate it. Each caste has a percentage of jobs reserved, in reverse order to the old religious hierarchy. Everyone is scrambling to prove how low his/her birth status is, in the scramble for admission to a Engineering Colleges.
In spite of it all, the place seems to have finally got its economic act together. It looks like the union bosses have decided not to bother the high tech firms, at least for the moment. More likely, some of them have been paid off. And some might have seen that this is the way to help the people they are supposed to represent. Whatever it is, a new sense of optimism pervades the place.
Globalization is bringing many changes to the American workplace. It is breaking up unionized industries like automobile manufacturing. CEO salaries are rocketing up while skilled workers are getting laid off, their jobs shipped overseas. The assumption is that all this will make the US more competitive.
Yet, some of the people competing with them have an egalitarian ethos which treats the employee with great respect. May be there is some value in putting the average worker at the center of things. Above all, human beings want to be treated fairly. The perception that management is responsive to the worker’s needs and is not merely taking advantage of the labor of the many, might be worth millions of dollars in stock options. Let the customer wait a couple of days if your key employee has a sick child at home. It may be more important to him than a raise. Efficiency is not everything.
Through the depression and post war years the American worker was the best treated in the world. Those were the years that made the US a superpower. It remains the most egalitarian, meritocratic society in the world. Let globalization not be an excuse to change all that and introduce an american caste system like the one that ruined many older societies like India.
Technorati Tags: Communism, Globalization, Kerala, Outsourcing, Politics
