Work at a call centre? New US Bill may spell doom for your job: Here's how

A legislation has been introduced in the Congress that would require call centre employees overseas to disclose their location and give customers a right to ask to transfer their call to a service agent in the US. Introduced by Senator Sherrod Brown from Ohio, the legislation also proposes to create a public list of companies that would outsource call centre jobs and give preference in federal contracts to companies that haven't shipped these jobs overseas. 

For far too long, US trade and tax policy has encouraged a corporate business model that shuts down operations in Ohio, cashes in on a tax credit at the expense of working Americans, and ships production to Reynosa, Mexico or Wuhan and China, he said.

"Jobs at call centres are some of the most vulnerable to offshoring. Too many companies have packed up their call centres in Ohio and across the country, and moved to India or Mexico," Senator Sherrod Brown said.

As more and more American businesses outsourced their back-end operations to India in the past two decades, a thriving IT industry arose here, employing millions of English-speaking software professionals. But some have also taken advantage of the trend and found ways to access data of U.S. customers and defraud them.

In 2016, computer-savvy criminals posing as Internal Revenue Service officers at call centres in India bilked unsuspecting Americans out of millions. The call centres were making more than $150,000 a day through scams that took place for a little over a year.

Americans lose around $1.5bn to tech-support scams every year; 86% of them originate in India, says a report published in The Guardian.

Impact of the Bill on Indian call centres

The India market rapidly diversified into many non-voice back-office activities such as IT development, shared service and transaction processing activities. The overall back office sector is now approximately 8% of India’s GDP and employs an estimated 3.1 million workers, says Site Selection group. However, voice-related call centre operations have become only 10% of that workforce with an estimated employment of 350,000 voice-related call centre workers, according to the Contact Center Association of the Philippines.

India's first few call centres: American Express and General Electric were the first companies to set up their back-office operations in India during the ’90s. 
 

Impact of call centres in India on Americans

According to a study by the Communications Workers of America, the largest communications and media labour union in the US, India and the Philippines are the top two destinations for US companies off-shoring call centre jobs.

American companies also have opened call centres in countries including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, China and Mexico, the study noted.

Here are the key findings of the report:

According to CWA's report, numerous major investigations have unearthed a range of fraudulent and criminal activity emanating from overseas call centres, including 

multiple scams operating out of Indian call centres and targeting US households. Most notably, in October 2016, details emerged of a massive fraud scheme targeting 

Americans and operating out of Indian call centres that has resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in victim losses from more than 15,000 victims in the

United States.

Over the past decade, the US has lost more than 200,000 call centre jobs, according to US Bureau of Labor Statistics data. At the same time, off-shore call centre jobs servicing the US have skyrocketed.

The proposed Bill would:

— Require that US callers be told the location of the call centre to which they are speaking;

— Offer callers the opportunity to be connected to a U.S. based centre if preferred; and

— Make US companies that off-shore their call centre jobs from the U.S. ineligible for certain federal grants

and taxpayer-funded loans.