The anti-outsourcing wave that has surfaced in spurts across the US, threatens to snatch thousands of jobs from India.
The anti-outsourcing wave that has surfaced in spurts across the US, threatens to snatch thousands of jobs from India.
What is alarming is that bad news has tumbled in from several quarters in two short weeks as lawmakers and labour unions gun for India.
Department of Children and Families Secretary George Sheldon told reporters on Friday that JPMorgan Chase, which contracts a debit-like card for food stamp users in Florida, will stop routing the calls to India.
“I gather that technologically this is a bigger deal than just flipping a switch. I don’t know how long this will take, but the process has begun,” Sheldon told the US media.
“It’s a very bad message, particularly in this economy but also across the board, to have call centers operating out of India,” Sheldon said. “They have agreed that they will immediately begin the process of rerouting the calls so that no Florida calls will be going to India.”
Friday’s anti-India decision came after Florida lawmakers went on the warpath this week after finding out that customer call centers in India are handling questions from food stamp recipients. The state is paying JPMorgan Chase & Co to handle a range of services for the Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) programme. Out of work and other needy Americans are allowed to use their EBT card to redeem food stamps at designated grocery stores or markets. JPMorgan uses two call centers in the United States and two in India to handle questions for EBT card holders.
Senator Ronda Storms, R-Valrico, said she still wants the US to look into any other outsourcing of state call centers. “This highlights a problem with our call centers
and we want to make sure that this doesn’t happen in the future,” Storms said. “I’m not finished with it yet by a long shot.”
The food stamps backlash comes a day after Delta Airlines chief Richard Anderson announced the world’s largest carrier had dumped its Indian call centre contractors because of “customer dissatisfaction”. He said Delta would not route customer service calls to India and would bring them back in-house.
According to industry analysts, hundreds of US jobs are likely to be preserved by Delta’s move. Bloomberg estimated that the Atlanta-based Delta has 4,500 employees who take customer service and reservation calls.
“Customer acceptance of call center representatives in other countries was low,” said Anderson flagging a big concern for Indian call centers.
Student lender Sallie Mae was the first to bring jobs back to the US from India. On April 8, it said it was planning to bring 2,000 jobs back to the US by shifting call center and IT operations from Bangalore, Pune and the Philippines. Capitol Hill cheered when the US student loan provider said it was willing to pay $35 million a year more in higher wages to bring the jobs back to America.
“It’s a patriotic act,” said Paul E Kanjorski, whose Wilkes-Barre district will receive 600 new Sallie Mae jobs, doubling the number of company employees at that location. “It sends a great message to corporate America to think as deeply as you can.”
Sallie Mae’s Albert Lord also said: “It was a tough decision to move these jobs overseas. It was a lot easier to make the decision to bring them back.” Lord is the new darling of the unions.
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