In a move that could potentially impact India and some other low-cost economies, a Bill introduced in the Senate seeks to keep American call centre jobs within the United States by placing restrictions on companies that move these jobs overseas.
And in a related development, a Washington-based group has launched an anti H-1B ad campaign at metro stations across the tech hub of San Francisco, asking US Congress to “fix H-1B law” so that companies are forced to seek and hire American workers.
“Too many companies have packed up their call centers in Ohio and across the country, and moved to India or Mexico,” said Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown from Ohio as he introduced his Bill to force American companies to keep their call centre jobs within the US.
Called the US Call Centre Workers and Consumer Protection Act, the Bill requires call centre agents overseas to “disclose their location and guarantee US customers the right to ask to transfer their call to a customer service agent who is physically located in the United States”.
The Bill also proposes to create a public list of companies that outsource call centre jobs, and give preference in federal contracts to companies that haven’t shipped these jobs overseas. It also requires companies to notify the Department of labour before they relocate call centers.
“Any companies on the list would be ineligible for federal grants or loans, with an exception for national security or substantial job loss in the United States,” the Bill says.
Stating that call centre jobs are among the most vulnerable to offshoring, Brown cited numbers from the Bureau of labour Statistics to say that the United States has lost 200,000 call centre jobs between 2006 and 2014.
“While foreign workers are not to blame for outsourced jobs and are often victims of the same failed trade agreements as American workers, most Americans want to support American jobs by buying American whenever they can. That includes the customer service they get from call centres,” Brown said.
He cited a new report from Communications Workers of America, which spoke of banks “aggressively offshoring call centre jobs outside of the US, even after the same big banks disproportionately benefited from the recent tax bill”.
Meanwhile, the Washington-based Progressives for Immigration Reform, a group that spearheads the cause of US workers, has launched its ad campaign in the San Francisco transit system, urging Congress to tighten legislative provisions against the H-1B work visas. Indian techies are the primary H-1B beneficiaries, accounting for roughly 70 per cent of the visas.
Coinciding as it does with the upcoming H-1B petitions filing season, the billboards put up by the group says that companies hiring foreign workers regard US tech workers as “expensive, undeserving and expendable”. Put up at Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) stations, the ads will run for a month.
“The idea is to make immigration work for the citizens as a whole,” BuzzFeed News quoted Kevin lynn, the group’s executive director, as saying. lynn said his group plans to launch similar campaigns to other tech centres across America in the hope of “swaying tech workers to pressure lawmakers”, adding: “Our goal is to inform workers of what they need to do to bring pressure to their elected to change this system that I think has run amok.”
BART, which is a beneficiary of the $80,000 campaign and has drawn flak for allowing these ads at the stations and in trains, said in a statement: “BART does not endorse these ads. BART is a safe and welcoming system for all people.”