An early sign of wealth is that once-attractive jobs are left unfilled. Indian call-centres are said to be struggling to recruit, says The Economist:
Finding and retaining qualified workers has become the industry's biggest medium-term worry. It may, as a new report by Gartner, a consultancy, puts it “stall the offshore call-centre boom”. The infant industry has grown explosively. Youngsters have hopped from job to job. Staff-attrition rates for the industry as a whole have climbed to 45-50% a year. Entry-level salaries have now reached about 10,000 rupees a month ($230), considered very high for a first job.
Last year the Financial Times reported a similar phenomenon in Chinese 'gold coast' sweatshops:
Last year, Yang Li left Luzhou, her quiet home in China's Sichuan province, to work in a lock factory about 1,000km awayin the bustling Pearl River delta just north of Hong Kong. After a month of polishing locks for 13 hours a day, she returned home, exhausted. Today, Ms Yang runs a hair salon in Luzhou and is relieved that her days as a labourer are over. "Every day at the factory was just work, work," she says. "My life here is comfortable. I can close the salon whenever I want."
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