This morning I had a technical question about my voice recognition software. After reading the “help” files and not having resolved my trouble, I placed a call to the company’s tech support line. Now, the company we’re talking about, Nuance Communications Inc. is headquartered right here in the good old U.S.A. They’re in Burlington Massachusetts to be exact. This is an important detail. Believe me. Well, tech support meant that I had to call Florida, the 407 area code. So, I did. And when I did I got this: “Good Morning, thank you for calling Nuance Technical Support. My name is Louise. Have you called about this issue before?”
My first impulse was to respond in Spanish. Louise is a name that occurs commonly in a variety of Hispanic communities, and as we all know, Florida has a massive Hispanic population. He had an accent, but it wasn’t distinctive enough to place it. So, I talked to good old Louise. Alarm bells began going off when we got to my first question, whether, given the advances made in the software in question, I, a totally blind user, still needed to employ a certain intermediary program to maximize my access to the voice recognition technology. A simple question, actually. When I talked to Nuance about six years ago, this interface I’m talking about was still widely used by blind users of Dragon Naturally Speaking, and Nuance was still recommending it. So, I know that the company knows what it is. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when the rep’s first questions revealed to me that he had no idea what in Heaven’s name I was talking about. Well, ok, I thought, not every tech rep is knowledgeable about everything. Let’s move on.
Finally, the representative is helping me register my product so that I can get faster tech support next time I need it, and during our chat he asks me about the weather here. I tell him the weather’s fine, which for Illinois in late January, it really is, and I ask him in turn how Florida’s weather is. And he says, “Oh, this is the Philippines.”” He told me that my call to Florida had been routed to him at his desk there in Manila, as were most tech support calls about my product, it seems.
Now, isn’t this a familiar story? How often do we have troubles with something from credit cards to computers and make a phone call, and get this (in extremely heavily-accented, barely comprehensible English), “Thank you for calling [company name]. My name is Robert. May I have your name please?” This happens to just about everyone these days. Comedians make fun of it. YouTube has who knows how many skits that poke fun at it. I’ve encountered it times without number with credit card accounts, technical support issues, even telemarketing. Today, people, I’m not laughing. If you haven’t figured it out, I’m talking about offshore outsourcing. It’s also known as ‘offshoring.’ Just so we’re straight on our terms here, I’m talking about situations where a company outsources overseas, not to another domestic company in country.
My first encounter with outsourcing came at the age of fifteen in the late 90’s. I was walking through the commercial district of my home town (in so far as an army brat has a home town), which is Clarksville Tennessee. We passed the Acme Boots plant. Now, let me say a word about this company. It was founded in Chicago by two shoe makers, Jessel and Sidney Kohn. They moved their children’s and infants’ shoe factory to Clarksville Tennessee and set up shop on Crossland Avenue. Around 1940, they became known as Acme Boots, a name that many Clarksvillians would still remember today. The company history goes on from there, but the thing you ought to know is that this was an American company, founded by Americans, built by Americans and selling to Americans. In 1989, its Clarksville plant closed up shop. I’m told that the jobs out of that plant that weren’t liquidated were relocated to various manufacturing spots around Mexico.
Back then, I didn’t have any understanding of business at all. I still have a limited understanding of large scale company finance. Then again, so do a lot of people. But I felt, standing there outside that closed up plant, that there was something wrong with closing up a local manufacturing facility, a place where men and women reported for work every day, did their work and took their duly earned pay, only to move that plant down to a country where those same jobs will be done by people who will be paid a pittance by our standards. Well, over a decade later, with two degrees under my belt and a third one on the way, now that I’m approaching 30 (only one more year until that happens), guess what, I still find something wrong with it.
The usual reason you see companies sending their work overseas has to do with cost-cutting. Oh, they’ll tell you things like, “we do it so we can offer our products to you at a lower price.” Whether or not that’s true, it saves the company overhead when they can pay a call center full of people a buck or two an hour to do work that they’d have to pay us seven bucks an hour to do an upwards. Does that make Americans greedy? I’ve actually heard diehard business people of one party or another call the American worker ‘greedy’ because he won’t take wages like what Chinese or Mexican workers will take. Well, I don’t want to make this a Democrats versus Republicans issue. I am so disinterested in both parties that I can’t even tell you which party is on which side of this issue. It’s an American issue, people. Whether you voted for Obama or McCain, or Bush or Carry, it affects you and me. I say all that so we can talk about it without politicizing it more than we have to.
So, why did I get some guy in the Philippines, way the hell and gone on the other side of the planet, when I, an American living in America, called an American company, using an American phone number, to get help? It happens all the time. But I submit to you this: just because our larger and medium-sized businesses see a profit margin in it for them, that doesn’t make it right. I know I’m not alone in this point-of-view either. In August 2004, Zogby International conducted a poll and found that 71% of American voters who participated said that they felt that this type of outsourcing hurt our economy, and another 62% felt that the government should impose some form of tax-based penalty on companies who outsourced. Well, that solution may or may not be workable or the best one. It sounds good, but I don’t know. Here’s something I do know, however.
As for us on this level, we average consumers, I have news for us too. Cheaper isn’t always better. Remember that thing in the news a few months ago about the Chinese drywall manufacturer having to settle a lawsuit with all those people on the Gulf Coast because their houses were falling apart? Here’s a link to an ABC news story about that:
The first question that popped into my head was, what the hell are homebuilders along the Gulf Coast doing getting their building materials from the Chinese? Sears used to build houses. Now the home builder of America is … let me get the right Anglicized spelling … Tianjin Co. I don’t care how much money we owe them. Do we have to let them build our houses? I’ve always thought Chinese-made stuff was junk to begin with, and so far, I haven’t been proven wrong. In fact, I’d say I’m right regardless of what the pro-Asian lobby thinks. A non-profit home building organization, Operation Helping Hands, actually went broke helping so many home owners across so many states to replace this stuff, which was corroding people’s pipes, their silverware and their jewelry and causing health problems.
Come on, folks! These are the same people who make most of the kids’ toys these days. You know, the ones you buy from Wal-Mart that fall apart as soon as you take them out of the box? Yeah, those guys. Drywall? Are you serious!
It’s time we stopped letting corporations opportunistically send jobs overseas. G.E., for instance, wants to send its x-ray division from Wisconsin to China. And the CEO claims that he expects that the move won’t cause any job losses. I doubt it. But even if he’s right about that based solely on the numbers, shouldn’t we be creating jobs here, not there? China keeps coming up, because it’s one of the most popular venues for our outsourcing. I guess the Chinese need our jobs more than we do, eh? India’s another one. Though most of the jobs that wind up in India have to do with customer support services, call centers and the like. If you have a question about your Master Card charge or your computer’s warrantee, it’s probably an Indian who will take the call. Again, I suppose New Deli residents need our entry level jobs much more than we Americans.
I know big business would reply and tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about. But I do, actually. Just because something is legal, does that mean you ought to do it? As for us, the buyers, who sold us on the idea that cheaper is always better? I would be glad to pay a few dollars more for an American product that was actually made here in the USA. Assuming you have the money, shouldn’t you? I know. American stuff is more expensive. It also lasts, people. You get what you pay for. I’ll just have to be on the lookout next time I want a laptop and not by Li-Chou LTD’s computers. No, that’s a made up company name, but give it time, people. The way this country’s going. Just give it time. It’s hard to know where to end a post like this. So, I’ll stop here. Think about what I’ve said, would you? Till next time.
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