Myth: US Call-Center Jobs Are Disappearing Overseas
Surprise — An economic pick-me-up for a Friday afternoon (HT Techdirt):
Looking at data gathered from a variety of sources, including company press releases, newsletters and reports, which still don’t cover all possible call center jobs, 62 percent of call center jobs are located in the U.S. and 6 percent in the United Kingdom. Canada and India each have 5 percent of the total market. “The myth is that all of the contact center jobs are going to India, but the truth is that that is not the case,” Butler said.
The reason for the misperception is that the press, local chambers of commerce, and companies themselves announce when call centers are closed, according to Butler. But the press doesn’t notice so much when one opens, in part because sometimes companies don’t say anything for fear of giving their competitors strategic information. “When a small center call center closes, it’s big news,” Butler said.
Fifty-two percent of all call centers opened between 2002 and 2006 are located in the U.S., Butler said. Another 16 percent were opened in the U.K. and 12 percent in the Philippines. Only 6 percent were opened in India.
On the other hand, the U.S. also leads the world in the percentage of call centers closed in the past five years, with three quarters of the shuttered total. The U.K. is next at 16 percent. Yet many of these are reopened in other U.S. locations to take advantage of lower prevailing wages, tax incentives, a better technology infrastructure or some combination of factors, according to Butler.
The net effect of the closures and openings in the last four years has been more than 183,000 new call center jobs, with about 25 percent of those in the U.S., according to Butler.
25% of 183,000 is about 46,000 new call-center jobs in the US in the past 4 years. That’s not a lot, and it appears to be a lot less than the growth in the rest of the workforce during that time.
But you would think from press accounts that call-center outsourcing is doing to US call-center employment what direct-dialing long-distance calls did to telephone operators. Not so.
Maybe the problem is that too many people at US-based call centers either can’t speak English fluently, or are recent immigrants who sound like they are from somewhere else.
