US bill restricting outsourced call center won’t affect RP

SAYS LABOR GROUP

MANILA, Philippines—A United States Senate bill seeking to discourage the transfer of American contact center jobs to foreign locations is not expected to adversely affect the booming business process outsourcing (BPO) industry in the Philippines, a Filipino labor leader said in a news release Sunday.

“We seriously doubt the bill will see the light of day,” said former senator Ernesto Herrera, secretary-general of the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP).

Dozens of American companies belonging to the Fortune 1000 have already relegated their contact center activities overseas, and their lobby should be more than enough to keep the bill in the back burner, Herrera said.

“There are actually two groups of American firms resisting the curbs—those which have outsourced their contact center activities, and the independent BPO contractors that have set up shop outside the US to handle the activities. Combined, they are large and highly influential,” Herrera said.

Herrera was referring to the bill filed by Senator Chuck Schumer (Democrat, New York) which seeks to penalize every customer call transferred outside the US with a $0.25 levy. The bill also proposes to require American companies to disclose to customers the foreign locations where their calls are being routed.

Herrera said he expects Schumer’s bill to expire by yearend without getting passed.

American companies are conveying a growing number of customer calls either to in-house contact centers or independent BPO contractors based in India, the Philippines, and other lower-cost locations with a large pool of English-speaking, college-educated workers.

To service customers in North America and elsewhere, US-based firms such as IBM Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., JP Morgan Chase & Co., American Express Co., Citigroup Inc., General Electric Co., Dell Inc., Lexmark International Inc., and Affiliated Computer Services Inc. have established in-house contact centers and back offices in Manila.

Independent American BPO contractors have also entrenched operations in the Philippines to service mostly US-based corporate clients.

These contractors include Cincinnati, Ohio-based Convergys Corp.; Englewood, Colorado-based TeleTech Holdings Inc.; Tampa, Florida-based Sykes Enterprises Inc.; Rochester, New York-based Sutherland Global Services Inc.; Freemont, California-based Synnex Corp.;

Denver, Colorado-based StarTek Inc.; Bannockburn, Illinois-based Apac Customer Services Inc.; Nashville, Tennessee-based Sitel Corp.; Omaha, Nebraska-based West Corp.; New York, New York-based KGB USA Inc.; Horsham, Pennsylvania-based NCO Group Inc.; and Los Angeles, California-based VXI Global Solutions Inc.

Still driven mainly by contact centers, the Philippines’ BPO industry fully employed 436,000 workers and generated $7.2 billion in revenues in 2009, according to Herrera, former chairman of the Senate committee on labor, employment and human resources development.

This year, Herrera said the industry is expected to add 84,000 full-time workers and increase revenues by $2.3 billion.–INQUIRER.net