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Asian Call Center Workers Trained With US Tax Dollars
gManZboy writes in with a troubling story about tax dollars being used for overseas call center training. "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. Congressman Tim Bishop (D-New York), told about the program on Tuesday, called it 'surprising and distressing.' Bishop recently introduced a bill that would make companies that outsource call centers ineligible for government contracts."
This just in: Politicians lie. Film at 11.
Bishop recently introduced a bill that would make companies that outsource call centers ineligible for government contracts.
So they're saying that they're no longer going to purchase HP, Dell, or Acer PCs? Somehow I suspect that bill is just posturing, and will not amount to anything.
They are entry level positions. The US job market's becoming more and more top heavy in the tech industry. People are having harder and harder times getting relevant experience as the foot-in-the-door positions have been moved overseas. Even worse, the same thing's started happening for more experienced positions.
In my current work environment, I've watched T1-3 jobs shuffle overseas. I'm one of the last people that was able to work my way up from an entry level position. Job listings have been demanding higher education coupled with experience, yet the latter is becoming rarer and rarer to come by. It's something that's been building for years and we're staring at a large experience gap in the industry.
Gee, I hope they succeed in bringing all of the call center work back to the United States! I would love to pay higher prices so that my countrymen can work menial jobs for 10 times the pay of their Asian counterparts (which still fails to provide a decent standard of living here), because more expensive products are good for everyday Americans already struggling to get by!
Actually, and all sarcasm aside. you are quite right. The few dollars more that you might spend on your PC, for example, could create living wage jobs for people here in this country. We need some major adjustments to the economy, but the math is what it is and when you stop sucking dollars out of it by off-shoring your labor, things are better. Period. We saw this throughout the eighties in the Pacific Northwest. Reagan's corporate welfare policies allowed corporations to make more money shipping raw logs overseas than they could by processing them into salable products here. The result was the virtually complete collapse of the timber industry. Entire communities became ghost towns when the paper and lumber mills shut down. Same shit, different decade, only on a much bigger scale.
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