I wasn’t surprised by the latest report from the Commerce
Department that shows the U.S. trade deficit, the excess of imports
over exports, had jumped in January to the biggest imbalance in
more than three years.
My phone was ringing in the house the other day when I was
out in the yard. By the time I got inside, it had stopped ringing,
so I hit the *69 automatic call-back number.
A woman with a foreign accent answered and said she was
calling to see when I was going to make a payment on my Macy’s
bill. I asked where she was calling from. “The Philippines,” she
said.
So, I buy a $95 Polo shirt from Macy’s with the little
embroidered horse on the front, imported by Ralph Lauren from Sri
Lanka or Vietnam, where the average hourly wage for garment
workers, respectively, is 46 cents and 52 cents. Then someone
phones from the Philippines, where the average starting wage in a
call center is $1.32 per hour, to tell me to keep my payments
current.
I thought about telling her that Americans wouldn’t have
to be called as much about their bills if American call centers
weren’t being exported to the Philippines, but I didn’t. She
wasn’t, to use the term President George W. Bush used to describe
himself, “the decider” with regard to capital mobility and the
costs and benefits of globalization.
A friend of mine had a similar problem with Macy’s when he
tried several times to call and make a simple change of address for
billing. The operators who picked up the phone in India went from
not understanding the language he was speaking to being wholly
incapable of making the address change.
I had the same problem when I called 411 last week to get
the phone number of a local pizza shop. “It’s the one that’s been
there forever, a few blocks from Rohrich Lexus in the South Hills,
right on the corner at the intersection with West Liberty Avenue,”
I explained.
That used to work when the operator was in Pittsburgh.
“Fiori’s Pizza,” she’d say. “Good hoagies.” Now there’s a young
girl who picks up the phone in Mumbai and has no idea what I’m
talking about.
The number of jobs in all this isn’t small. “The
Philippines now leads India in call-center jobs, employing 350,000
compared with India’s 330,000,” reported USA
Today.
Correspondingly, the amount of extra profit from
outsourcing call centers isn’t small. “The positions pay the
equivalent of around $4,300 U.S. per year, according to the
Business Processing Association of the Philippines,” reported
USA Today. “By comparison, call center jobs in the U.S. —
when they can be found — may pay $16,000 to $22,000 a
year.”
The difference between the $22,000 and $4,300 is $17,700
per operator a year. For the aforementioned 680,000 operator jobs
in India and the Philippines, that comes to more than $12 billion
in lower labor costs if jobs are outsourced from Chicago and
Atlanta to Mumbai and New Delhi — $12 billion in extra profits and
$12 billion in forgone wages in U.S. call centers.
And now that we’re talking about phone headaches, I don’t
like it when I call Toys R Us and have to sit through a recording
about their locations, store hours, website, and a spiel about the
company’s “exciting employment opportunities” before I can get to
the point in the call where I can hit the prescribed number and
then wait some more until a “guest service associate” gets around
to picking up the phone.
I didn’t need the store hours or location, or a job. I
just wanted to see if they had any Saab model planes in stock. That
night, there was a 60th birthday party for an ex-pilot friend of
mine from Sweden who used to fly Saabs in his top gun
years.
I never did find out if the store had any Saab models in
stock. No “guest service associate” ever picked up the
phone.
After maybe a dozen unanswered rings on that first call, I
hung up and tried again, calling back and listening to the same
recorded pitch about the “exciting employment opportunities” and
the website and store hours and location.
At the end of the message on this second call, I pushed
the correct number again to get a “guest service associate.” No one
ever answered. The phone just rang, unanswered again, maybe a dozen
times.
Not tossing in the towel, I phoned a third time (not
because I’m so determined, but only because I saw an article in the
making) and it was déjà vu all over again. Another sitting through
the recording and then no “guest service associate” picking up the
phone during a dozen rings.
I know all this is supposed to increase profits according
to the number crunchers in the company’s main office. Why hire an
actual person to answer the phone when a cheaper tape can do the
job? Why hire someone who might not be busy every second of the day
when the company can just make the rest of us waste our time on the
phone?
What’s missing in their calculations is the model plane
that didn’t fly off the shelf.
