Republicans vote down a bill to prevent call centers from being off shore
gocar
2012/06/20 22:11:42
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Wells Fargo, T-Mobile are among the corporations who have call centers in foreign countries. The Republicans voted down a bill that would encourage companies to bring those jobs back to America. 500,000 jobs have been lost to foreign call centers in the past 6 months. The Call Center and Worker Protections Act would have cut off federal loans to corporations that operate call centers off shore. It was voted down by all the Republicans and some Democrats. Which of course shows how the Dems really never have been in control because there are Dems who vote with Republican more of the time than not. Plus they are all sucking up to their campaign donators.
Top Opinion
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Che Guevara - Hero 2012/06/20 22:19:39shame on them
+5Republicans care little about American Workers. They are bought and paid for by the Wealthy and the Corporations.
http://www.cwanj.org/content/...
Apr 24, 2012
Washington, D.C. – April 24, 2012 - The Communications Workers of America (CWA) today said the revelation that U.S. taxpayer dollars have been used to train overseas call center workers raises worrisome questions about priorities, accountability, and common sense as the domestic call center industry continues to shed jobs, losing over 500,000 since 2006 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Last week, U.S. Representatives Tim Bishop (D-NY) and Walter Jones (R-NC) issued a letter to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) inquiring about the agency’s involvement in the American taxpayer-funded training of overseas call center workers in the Philippines. Subsequently, USAID announced the suspension of its participation in this program.
“We commend Representatives Bishop and Jones on their efforts to call attention to this program and to ensure that taxpayer money is used to strengthen the American workforce above all,” said CWA Legislative Director Shane Larson. “Representing 150,000 customer service professionals gives us the responsibility to assure they go to...
http://www.cwanj.org/content/...
Apr 24, 2012
Washington, D.C. – April 24, 2012 - The Communications Workers of America (CWA) today said the revelation that U.S. taxpayer dollars have been used to train overseas call center workers raises worrisome questions about priorities, accountability, and common sense as the domestic call center industry continues to shed jobs, losing over 500,000 since 2006 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Last week, U.S. Representatives Tim Bishop (D-NY) and Walter Jones (R-NC) issued a letter to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) inquiring about the agency’s involvement in the American taxpayer-funded training of overseas call center workers in the Philippines. Subsequently, USAID announced the suspension of its participation in this program.
“We commend Representatives Bishop and Jones on their efforts to call attention to this program and to ensure that taxpayer money is used to strengthen the American workforce above all,” said CWA Legislative Director Shane Larson. “Representing 150,000 customer service professionals gives us the responsibility to assure they go to work every day on a level playing field.”
The original letter from Rep. Bishop and Rep. Jones noted the stakes: to “essentially underwrite our international competitors is short-sighted public policy and a direct threat to our economic competitiveness.”
Following the USAID announcement about the program’s suspension, Rep. Bishop pledged to “ensure that America's international economic development efforts in no way contribute to shipping our jobs overseas."
CWA strongly supports the continuing bipartisan efforts by Rep. Bishop along with over 100 members of both parties, who support legislation to strengthen the U.S. call center industry and to crack down on fraud emanating from overseas call centers in the process.
http://www.cwa-union.org/news...
For outbound calls a person should have to physically punch the number into the telephone, and the company should be subject to a $10,000 fine for every time they call someone on the federal do not call list or if they call someone after being asked not to. "Wardialing" (computer dialing several numbers, then sending the first answer to a operator and dropping the other calls) should be utterly banned.
http://www.cwanj.org/content/...
have you ever known a Bill passed that did not have riders on them, not dealing with what the Bill is intended to do, honestly?
Florian EngageAmerica .5 Fans .05:09 PM on 03/29/2012
This is a bit of a catch 22. We want to penalize companies for sending jobs overseas. Yet the country that wants to penalize us for sending jobs overseas because it won’t change its own regulatory policy. Isn’t there something wrong with this issue? It would seem to me that there would be less of a reason for Americans to send jobs overseas if there were an easier regulatory policy for companies n the united states that would allow them to thrive an prosper in what is an already very tough economic environment. (http://bit.ly/w5FPPq) If we don’t change these policies, this penalization unjust for companies who are just trying to do well.
I know you can discuss my comment. Some companies outsource, some companies have enough capital to spend on American based call centers. Some need to cut back on spending, the last 4-5 years people have been paying down debt and trying to mingle up as much capital as they can in any way possible. Keeping a business afloat is better for the economy than those lost jobs placed over seas.
Asian Call Center Workers Trained With U.S. Tax Dollars
Multimillion dollar USAID program trains college students in the Philippines to work in offshore call centers, but one Congressman tells InformationWeek he's going to put a stop to it.
Despite President Obama's recent call for companies to "insource" jobs sent overseas, it turns out that the federal government itself is spending millions of dollars to train foreign students for employment in some booming career fields--including working in offshore call centers that serve U.S. businesses.
The program is called JEEP, which stands for Job Enabling English Proficiency. It's available to college students in the Philippines through USAID. That's the same agency that until a couple of years ago was spending millions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer money to train offshore IT workers in Sri Lanka--until I reported that inconvenient truth in this story. The ensuing uproar led to the Sri Lanka initiative's termination.
A JEEP document published by USAID notes that the program "is classroom based, and focuses on the specialized English skills required by employers in areas such as: nursing and allied healthcare; maritime services; travel and tourism services; business process outsourcing (BPO), ...
Asian Call Center Workers Trained With U.S. Tax Dollars
Multimillion dollar USAID program trains college students in the Philippines to work in offshore call centers, but one Congressman tells InformationWeek he's going to put a stop to it.
Despite President Obama's recent call for companies to "insource" jobs sent overseas, it turns out that the federal government itself is spending millions of dollars to train foreign students for employment in some booming career fields--including working in offshore call centers that serve U.S. businesses.
The program is called JEEP, which stands for Job Enabling English Proficiency. It's available to college students in the Philippines through USAID. That's the same agency that until a couple of years ago was spending millions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer money to train offshore IT workers in Sri Lanka--until I reported that inconvenient truth in this story. The ensuing uproar led to the Sri Lanka initiative's termination.
A JEEP document published by USAID notes that the program "is classroom based, and focuses on the specialized English skills required by employers in areas such as: nursing and allied healthcare; maritime services; travel and tourism services; business process outsourcing (BPO), and other areas of international employment." Students--there are about 23,000 in the Philippines currently enrolled--commit to undertake 400 hours of training during two years of study.
It's the BPO (another name for call center operations) part of the curriculum that's troubling for U.S. offshoring opponents. When I informed Congressman Tim Bishop (D-New York) about the program on Tuesday, he called it "surprising and distressing." Bishop, who was instrumental in getting USAID to end its Sri Lanka program, recently introduced a bill that would make companies that outsource call centers ineligible for government contracts.
The U.S. "has lost five hundred thousand call center jobs in the last five years," Bishop noted during a phone interview.
[ What impacts workers more, outsourcing or automation? See Outsourcing or Automation: No Difference To Unemployed Workers. ]
JEEP is part of a larger USAID initiative in the Philippines, known as Growth and Equity in Mindanao (GEM), on which the agency is spending about $100 million per year, according to an audit by the USAID's Office of Inspector General. Mindanao is a region in the southern Philippines that's known as a stronghold for Muslim rebels opposed to the central government.
"The JEEP program was developed to promote peace and stability in Mindanao by teaching English to youth in conflict-prone areas to help them pursue gainful employment in tourism, nursing and other locally-based industries and to break the cycle of violence which had gripped that region of the Philippines," a USAID spokesperson said, in an e-mail.
Bishop countered that such efforts shouldn't come at the expense of U.S. workers. "We have foreign policy imperatives, we have international development imperatives, but our No. 1 imperative has to be the protection and creation of jobs here in this country," Bishop said.
USAID's spokesperson said JEEP is set to expire at the end of the year. But Bishop wants it stopped immediately, he said.
"We have a serious jobs deficit in this country and the fact that we would spend U.S. taxpayer dollars to prepare foreign nationals to take over jobs that can easily be done by Americans is shocking" he said. "I'm going to write to the USAID administrator and demand that this program be terminated. And during the appropriations process I will entertain any option I have to cut off the flow of funds to this project."
What's especially troubling is that the JEEP program is operating even as President Obama is calling on companies to return call center work and other jobs to the U.S. Here's what he said at an "insourcing summit" at The White House in January. "My message to business leaders today is simple. Ask yourself what you can do to bring jobs back to the country that made our success possible. And I'm going to do everything in my power to help you do it."
Even as he spoke, the President's hand-picked head of USAID, Rajiv Shah, was overseeing a program to train offshore call center workers. Is that hypocrisy or just managerial incompetence on the part of the White House?
In my view, if a privately-owned company (including "publicly" traded ones like IBM) wants to outsource work overseas, that's its business. Ultimately, the executives who make such a decision will be answerable to shareholders and customers. If the strategy works, they'll be rewarded. If not, they'll get pummeled by the market.
But it's unfathomable that a federal agency like USAID should be (again) dipping into the public trough for money to train foreign nationals to work in overseas call centers.
Nominate your company for the 2012 InformationWeek 500--our 24th annual ranking of the nation's very best business technology innovators. Deadline is April 27. Organizations with $250 million or more in revenue may apply for the 2012 InformationWeek 500 now.
http://www.informationweek.co...
So much for the republicans "creating jobs"!!
No, not at all.
How do you justify that hypocrisy?