Low Wage in High Tech: An Ethnography of Service Workers in Global India

India's multinational call centers and software firms are housed in gleaming corporate towers within lavish economic zones; spaces that have become symbolic of new, sanitized, technology-driven development regimes. However, little is known about the workers who are responsible for the daily maintenance of these multinational corporate spaces.

Featuring rich ethnographic narratives combined with institutional and policy analyses, Low Wage in High Tech assesses the impact of the growth of multinational technology firms on low-wage service workers. It provides a unique look at the lives and livelihoods of housekeepers, drivers, and security guards who work in these firms. Despite working for wealthy global corporations that are distinctively associated with progress and promise, service employees often work extremely long hours, at low wages, with no health or pension benefits, and few prospects for social or economic mobility as a result. While they may have the hope of joining those included in India's economic miracle, these workers also experience social and economic barriers that continually threaten to perpetuate long-established cycles of poverty. In this sense, they are excluded from the "new India" that their places of work represent. Low Wage in High Tech presents these workers' stories of immobility and exclusion, giving them a long-overdue voice and representation in the research on India's technology boom.

Low Wage in High Tech is a volume in the series ISSUES OF GLOBALIZATION: CASE STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY ANTHROPOLOGY, which examines the experiences of individual communities in our contemporary world. Each volume offers a brief and engaging exploration of a particular issue arising from globalization and its cultural, political, and economic effects on certain peoples or groups.

Kiran Mirchandani is Professor in the Adult Education and Community Development Program at the University of Toronto, Canada.

Sanjukta Mukherjee is Associate Professor in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies at DePaul University, USA.

Shruti Tambe is Professor in the Department of Sociology at the Centre for Advanced Studies, Savitribai Phule Pune University, India.