Senators call on Trump to act against the offshoring of American call center jobs

February 9, 2017, https://www.cwa-union.org/news/senators-call-on-trump-act-against-offshoring-of-american-call-center-jobs

Democratic Senators Bob Casey (D-PA), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Joe Donnelly (D-IN), Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND), Joe Manchin (D-WV), and Claire McCaskill (D-MO) sent a letter to President Trump encouraging his Administration to take action to help protect and bring call center jobs back to the United States, noting that the industry had lost hundreds of thousands of jobs over the past decade due to offshoring.

The letter to President Trump reads, in part:

“We are writing today to strongly encourage you to not only focus on bringing back manufacturing jobs, but service sector jobs as well; in particular customer service and call center jobs. We urge you to take executive action and to support legislation to help protect and bring call center jobs back to the United States.”

Additionally, the letter highlights that offshoring call center jobs has put American consumer information at increased risk. For example, in October 2016, the U.S. Department of Justice released an indictment against a group of perpetrators operating out of Indian call center whose “enormous and complex fraud scheme…resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in victim losses from…over 15,000 known victims” in America.

The Senate Democrats’ letter concludes with a call for President Trump to take related executive action and for the White House to support soon-to-be-introduced call center legislation similar to bipartisan bills introduced in past sessions of Congress.

For example, Senator Casey’s “United States Call Center Worker and Consumer Protection Act,” introduced in the last Congress, would require that U.S. callers be told the location of the call center to which they are speaking; would offer callers the opportunity to be connected to a U.S.-based center if preferred; and would make U.S. companies who offshore their call center jobs from the U.S. ineligible for certain federal grants and taxpayer-funded loans.