A Cynical Approach to Telemarketing Jobs

A new bill has been introduced in Congress that would penalize American companies for sending their telemarketing operations abroad and ostensibly depriving Americans of jobs during a period of massive unemployment.

As written now, the bill, the “U.S. Call Center Worker and Consumer Protection Act,” sponsored by Rep. Tim Bishop (D-NY), would make U.S. firms that outsource telemarketing ineligible for federal loans and grants for five years if they move their telemarketing operations offshore. This measure would also require those firms to report the fact that they outsource to the labor department ahead of time.

Sounds like election-year pandering to me.

Would such a bill have any chance of getting through the GOP-controlled House?

And could this measure really deter firms from going abroad when the financial rewards of doing do are so evident?

To say nothing of lobbying from India and the Philippines which would lose under this bill since many of those U.S.-based jobs have gone to those countries over the past four or five years, according to USA Today.

According to Tim Searcy, president of Accent Marketing and former CEO of the American Teleservices Association, only a little more than 14% of U.S. firms actually do outsource but many of them keep more complex customer service operations stateside while exporting order-taking functions because doing so is easy, cheap and legal.

It’s obviously gonna take a lot more than election-year posturing to reverse these conditions. If they can be reversed.