BANGALORE, India — From Europe and North America, India's offshore workers — call center operators, data entry clerks and telemarketers — may seem like the sweatshop laborers of the information age, toiling long hours for meager pay.

But an international alliance of unions that wants to organize them is finding a different reality in India: Many think of themselves as members of a relatively well-paid, respected professional elite in no need of a union's protection.

"I know these young people have a negative image about unions," says Narayan Ram Hegde of Union Network International, a global alliance of 900 unions.

But "these professionals are more like cyber coolies," he said. "We hope we will be able to convince them over time."

Hegde is leading the UNI drive to unionize workers in India's back-office outsourcing industry — a sector that employs about 350,000 people and is expected to add 80,000 jobs this year.

UNI has been quietly setting up the union for the past year — its formal launch date is Sept. 18. But it has so far managed to attract only about 500 recruits, underscoring workers' hostility to unions and the enormity of the task faced by organizers.

"A union would make sense if there was no job security," said K. V. Sudhakar, who does technical support work in IBM's offshore outsourcing center in the western city of Pune. "Here jobs are more, people are less — companies are trying all means possible to keep employees happy so that they won't leave."

It's not the first time UNI has encountered such sentiments. A previous effort to start a union for Indian software programmers — the highly skilled elite of the business — flopped in 2000 after the programmers balked at joining, offering similar reasons.

A similar situation is playing out in the U.S. where, with manufacturing jobs disappearing, many union leaders say they must organize high-tech workers and academics to survive. But the Communications Workers of America has had a tough job trying to organize white-collar workers at companies such as IBM Corp. and Microsoft Corp.

Global companies have increasingly farmed out any task that can be done over a computer network to low-wage countries. India is the undisputed king of the business with 44 percent of the global market and an industry that earned revenues of $17.2 billion in 2004.

Burnout is common and three out every 10 workers change jobs a year. Industry experts say stress forces one in seven workers to leave the industry every year.

But the money can be a powerful lure in India, where per capita income hovers around $500 a year and most people make much less toiling in dusty fields or on steaming city streets.

Call center rookies, in contrast, make about $2,400 a year _ roughly twice the pay of first-year teachers, accountants or lawyers