Posted on 05/29/2012 12:26:02 PM PDT by Theoria
Your account information will now be accessible to call center workers in the Philippines.
Bank of America, which last fall announced plans to lay off 30,000 workers, is about to go on a hiring spree—overseas.
America's second-largest bank is relocating its business-support operations to the Philippines, according to a high-ranking Filipino government official recently quoted in the Filipino press. The move, which includes a portion of the bank's customer service unit, comes less than three years after Bank of America received a $45 billion federal bailout.
Roman Romulo, deputy majority leader of the Philippine House of Representatives, bragged to the Manila Standard Today earlier this month that the Philippines "has secured its place as the world's fastest-growing outsourcing hub." Romulo pointed out that BofA is the last of the "big four" US banks to move their business-support network to his island nation, where the average family makes $4,700 a year.
A spokesman for Bank of America, Mark Pipitone, was unable to provide additional information about the bank's offshoring plans on Friday. "We have employees and operations where we can ensure that we best serve our customers and clients," he told me in an email.
The bank's outsourcing comes amid rising concerns about the security of customers' financial data in the hands of foreign contractors. In March, undercover reporters for England's Sunday Times met in India with "IT consultants" who claimed they were call center workers and offered to sell them credit card and medical information for 500,000 Britons—including account holders at major banks such as HSBC.
To prevent similar scandals from rocking the Philippines, Romulo is pushing a law that would require Filipino companies to "protect the integrity and confidentiality of any personal information collected from their clients, in compliance with international privacy standards," according to the Filipino television network ABS/CBN News.
US banks already are operating call centers in the Philippines, "despite the fact that they haven't actually passed this rudimentary legislation," says Shane Larson, legislative director for the Communication Workers of America (CWA), which represents 150,000 American call center workers. The Indian government is ahead of the Philippines in passing data privacy laws, notes the union, but those laws specifically exempt the call center industry. And that could lead to problems: In a 2005 survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers, 85 percent of the Indian outsourcing companies that responded said they had experienced information security breaches in the previous year.
In a 2010 report on the offshoring of technical jobs, New York's Department of Labor concluded that data security in the medical and financial fields is "of critical concern" and that "other nations' legal systems (especially in developing countries such as India) require reform to match that of the US with respect to privacy and computer security."
Needless to say, the outsourcing is bad news for an already hurting US call center industry, which has shed some 500,000 jobs during the past four years—about 10 percent of the total. The CWA hopes to reverse this trend by pushing the US Call Center and Consumer Protection Act, a bill that would make any company that outsources call center jobs ineligible for federal loans and grants.
In recent years, local governments in the deindustrializing Midwest have tried to boost their economies by luring call centers with generous tax breaks and economic incentives. T-Mobile, for instance, accepted more than $61 million in state and local recruitment subsidies to locate call center jobs here. But it recently announced it would close seven American call centers, putting around 2,000 people out of work—even as it continues to operate centers in the Philippines and Honduras. (The CWA called the company out in a recent report titled "Why Shipping Call Center Jobs Overseas Hurts Us Back Home.")
In addition to the "frustrations" of dealing with customer-service workers halfway around the globe, "there is the bigger picture of how opaque the process is, and, as a result, some of the security questions that are raised," says Larson of the CWA. "I think Americans deserve to know to whom they are speaking and to where their information is going."
There is an old adage. “Whats good for business is good for America.”Its simply not true. Sure there are plenty of reasons why companies move offshore but that does not make the statement any less false. Whats good for business is good for business and will remain so until we get unions under control and the government less involved in private enterprise.
I agree on the Gov’t, but we are experiencing record low union membership. Unions are dying.
Bank America paid back their TARP they were forced to take- with interest
They are free to do business in the most economical way they can, to benefit their stockholders and customers
There may be fewer BoA bank clerks in the US but there will be more customer and stockholder wealth to spread into other opportunities
Capitalism is a grand thing - if we stop letting obamite liberals poison us to it
I wander how many commies at MoJo buy American?
Instead of tax incentives for targeted enterprises, how about lower taxes on business (the U.S. currently is the highest in the world) and getting rid of the minimum wage. Boom. Jobs.
Sure, we should have let them fail. We didn't.
BoA was not failing (even though some of our present stalwart govt officials and their Goldman Sachs etc cronies were among the weasels who bamboozled Ken Lewis into taking on Merrill Lynch)
BoA was among the banks forced to take TARP money to disguise who was REALLY failing
Ken Lewis vowed to raise the funds to pay it back before he was forced out- and he did- despite obstacles the govt used to try and prevent TARP paybacks (obama can’ pwn a bank if if they didn’t owe the money)
Yup. Under capitalism there is no TBTF.
I will say A: not fast enough and B: too many times one reads an article where unions agree to cuts in labor force to save compensation package. They have helped kill themselves off. Make no mistake the union leaders don’t care how many workers they have only how many vote to keep them at the head of the union.
As the world economies continue to tank. The siren call of protectionism will echo through the crowds.
nothing but Mother Jones predictably pushing Obama to take a populist run at the banks
“The siren call of protectionism will echo through the crowds.”
The crowds will be thinner; many Americans aren’t breeding as our economy reaches European levels of instability.
“where the average family makes $4,700 a year”
The customers and stockholders are increasingly foreigners as well; the American customers get threatened with $5 MAC card fees to further impoverish them.
Anyone who thought outsourcing to Third World countries would help the US in the long run is delusional. At least the call centers are closer to where B of A will actually have customers (Red China), while Americans are scrounging for wheat pennies and such to buy groceries.
We have built Asia while destroying ourselves.
They are free to do business in the most economical way they can, to benefit their stockholders and customers
There may be fewer BoA bank clerks in the US but there will be more customer and stockholder wealth to spread into other opportunities
Capitalism is a grand thing - if we stop letting obamite liberals poison us to it
I agree with what you’ve said. But if the high paying jobs all leave the U.S. then there will not be the money here to buy these companies products. You could say that would be an example of poor long-range business planning.
In the end it leaves a much poorer world economy. You can’t bring everyone up to a high standard of living by knocking down the ones that already are there.
Jobs overseas create wealth for America.
They create wealth that enables people overseas to buy American goods and services...that boosts the value of our companies and their stock.
Of course we have to compete globally with China, India, South Korea and the like.
So..?
Protectionism is a failed idea. Ask the former American steel workers.
Do you think many US investors and pension funds own stock in BoA? If this boosts BoA bottom line it boosts every owner and investor. If not, then they vote out the BoA management or pull their money and invest elsewhere.
To what union do BoA employees belong?
American taxpayers are on the hook for providing a navy to protect those foreign assets. Shouldn't China or the Philippines float their own navies and fly their own airforces to protect BoA operations in Manilla?
Since Japan, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam and S. Korea are our friends, we don't need both the 5th and 7th fleets there anymore. We can send the 5th home and park the 7th in the Sea of Japan off the nork coast.
Come to think of it, exactly what are we "defending" in the M.E.? Is it private property. Are taxpayer dollars being used to defend private property on foreign soil? Shouldn't the free market mavens who enjoy the profits gained on foreign soil just let the local governments protect them?
The day I don't have to spend one nickel to protect a privately own ship at an overseas port from pirates you can talk about "protectionism" but right now the argument falls flat. Right now we're subsidizing foreign operations.
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