"Internet service provider EarthLink is laying off most of its call center employees and outsourcing the work to domestic and overseas companies, in an effort to cut costs.

The company on Tuesday said it will shut down call centers in Harrisburg, Pa.; Roseville, Calif.; San Jose, Calif.; and Pasadena, Calif., resulting in 1,300 job cuts. EarthLink will also reduce call center operations in Atlanta by the end of the first quarter this year.

The company will outsource most of its call center jobs to companies based in the United States, India and the Philippines.

"The number of employees being outsourced offshore will increase," EarthLink spokesman Dan Greenfield said. "We still will have some internal contact center operations, but the bulk will be outsourced."

EarthLink joins a growing number of companies that are looking abroad for cheaper outsourced labor. America Online also runs outsourced call centers in India and the Philippines to complement its domestic centers in a number of states.

Just recently, AOL confirmed that it will hire software engineers in Bangalore, India, to work on projects with its U.S. staff. Web portal Yahoo in July said it planned to hire 100 engineers in Bangalore by the end of 2004.

More than 80 percent of software companies are shipping skilled work overseas to save money, according to research firm Sand Hill Group. This trend has sparked concerns that most technology jobs will be located outside the United States within the next decade. "

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OK, this is not an RIAA story, or even a music story, I concede that, but is it important? I think yes. The reason is that it reflects what seems to be a neverending trend to ourcource our jobs in every sector possible. Many years ago, I worked in tech support, and I can tell you that the feeling of every company I have dealt with is that, they HATE having to provide tech support, and if they could eliminate ALL tech support, they would. They see tech support as an outflow of money that gains no return (I know..it's stupid...but I guarantee you that's the real fact about the matter).

This "jobless recovery" nonsense, has its fallacy highlighted by the enormous hemorrhage of jobs from this country, with no hope of them ever returning. We have no apparent source of a transfusion for this hemorrhage either, and I think, the analogy here is quite apt. One cannot exist without blood, and I'll be damned if I can see how we as a country, can continue to sustain this economy as more and more jobs are exported, with a one way ticket.

FULL ARTICLE
HERE

"Hi this is Earthlink support can I help you?"
"Yes I have just got Earthlink installed and it comes with this 'Earthlink Technofast' cable modem and need help in setting it up"
"Technofast?" Sounds of rifling through papers. "Is that what Earthlink supplied you with?"
"Yes"
"Hmm. I don't seem to have anything here about that model of modem. Are you sure it's Earthlink?"
"Yes I am sure it has 'Earthlink Technofast' wrriten on it"
"Well I don't have anything here about that model. Hold on. Let me check with my supervisor" Sound of some crappy music plays while you are put on hold for 10 minutes.
"Hello? Are you still there?"
"Yes I've been waiting for 10 minutes now at $1 a minute!"
"Aah sorry about that. I'm afraid we cannot find any information about that model of modem. It must be something new. We have not had any memo about it yet. Can you try calling back next week? We are still setting up the computer system here"
"What? A week? You must be kidding me? Can I speak to the supervisor?"
"I'm sorry I cannot do that"
"Why not?"
"Well..." long pause "He does not speak good English"
"Eh? Why not?"
"He's from Bangladesh"
"Huh? Since when have US companies been hiring non-English speaking staff for English speaking customer services?"
"Since they started outsourcing their support to other countries sir"
"What? Where the hell are you?"
"I'm in Bangladesh sir"
"What? Your shittin me right?"
"No sir"
"I don't believe this..." hangs up in disgust and throws modem out the window.

"What? A week? You must be kidding me? Can I speak to the supervisor?"
"I'm sorry I cannot do that"
"Why not?"
"Well..." long pause "He does not speak good English"

This scenario is ridiculous. Of course the supervisors speak English. I have always received quality service from India based customer service reps. That being said, this outsourcing trend is very disturbing. Our middle class is shrinking and we are slowly becoming a third world country.

may be that you have received quality service from India but that Arescom modem I got from MSN required I get tech support from somewhere in Mexico and they were as clueless as I was.

I understand Dell (or was it Gateway?) contracted a firm in India to do their tech support... and ended up having to bring it back this year due to the volume of complaints of bad service.

Doing it cheaper does not neccesarily equate to being better. Sadly, there is that ever-increasing tendancy to try to make hay at any price, and if they get compaints, well, they made good money while it lasted. Once again, bottom-line wins over common-sense. Disgusting.

"be that you have received quality service from India"

Fair enough, but to suggest the supervisors can't speak English is still ridiculous.

"I understand Dell (or was it Gateway?) contracted a firm in India to do their tech support... and ended up having to bring it back"

That makes me happy. May all the CEO's outsourcing jobs for higher profit margins and stock prices rot in hell for eternity.

Something consumers don't know is that at some places...if a "real supervisor" is not available...you really get just another tech....assuming the role of a supervisor...and, most often, even if you are getting a "real supervisor"....they are all operating out of the same playbook and you will get the same answer.

One thing anyone who calls tech support has to understand is this....techs (as a former tech I know) are monitored, watched, recorded, and their conversations reviewed by QA ("quality assurance")...and really gauged by low call times...so they are stressed to begi with. As I have said...these companies don't even want to have tech support, and want to get buy with the lowest number of live tech calls possible, and have them all handled with minimum call times. At an unnamed company I worked at..there were big digital clocks indicating average call wait times, and if the times got too long...you got crap about it...

Another thing is that, at its best, tech support is a crappy job...and often, by the time you get a call, the "customer" is cursing you out because their problem didn't get resolved (and the reason is usually do to company guidelines that you must adhere to and don't control)..so, I feel sorry for these poor guys in India, dealing in not a native language, with people who are already pissed off and just demand someone bring a new box out to them (usually not gonna happen).

As for supervisors speaking Engish...I agree w/ mroop that all call center supervisors (or level two techs) probably do speak English...but some of the accents that people in India have, can make it difficult to understand them.

I blame the companies for this outsourcing nonsense. For example, Dell used to have construction/assembly facilities in Round Rock Texas...they moved these to China....

The allegiance of these corps is the bottom line and paying the CEO...they have no loyalty or fidelity to the citizens of the USA....

typos...begi with= begin with
want to get buy = want to get by

I also managed a small call center for a small insurance company. The reps take a lot of crap and I was proud of my reps who handled it with grace under pressure. In the summer on Fridays I bought ice cream and all the toppings so they could make their own ice cream sundaes. : ) The rude ones got sent packing.

Wow I bet this will do wonders for our unemployment rate. Seems a bit obsured that a firm would be allowed to grab kids fresh out of highschool and train them to know nothing more than what they need to work for them. Then suddenly drop them back into society with no education and no more prospects than working at mcdonalds or maybe someday being lucky enough to get another job on the phone. It really seems to me that that firm has hurt society more than helped and operations like this should be avoided in the future.

mroop...when I did supervision, we had software that we could view the "after call" time for each tech, their average call times, just about everything they did...you could literally sit there and watch dozens of techs and do micromanagement and evaluation of their performance on a second by second basis (call times were measured to the hundredth of a second)....

I can recall a call...will never forget it...where we had a guy demanding to talk to a supervisor (ME)...he called from LA, and tried to tell me there was not a computer in LA where he could make a Windows startup floppy disk...

I suggested a library, and he claimed there were no libraries near him...
he was demanding we just send him a new computer....he refused to troubleshoot (this was part of his legal agreement...i.e. the agreement to troubleshoot on the phone)....I remember telling him to "Have a nice day" and as I was putting the phone down...a torrent of the foulest obscenities you can imagine.....

"so it goes..."- K. Vonnegut

oh yeah...and I can recall that about the only break the techs had from the stress and monotony in their cubicles...was downloading music and movies and burning them to CDs while they were doing tech support....

Occasionally, a box got audited and they removed everything...but I remember the guy that got busted had a KORN picture for his desktop...Korn screensaver....and wore Korn t-shirts.....

He wouldn't have been a more obvious target for box audit if he had sat there with his headset on mute, singing along with his downloaded MP3s....

Believe it or not... There are more call centers located off our shores than any of us can realize all ready. Only recently, have any companies started to announce that it is happening.

"(call times were measured to the hundredth of a second)...."

Holy cow. We didn't have any monitoring software at all and the pc's were not online either. It was a very basic operation.

CNN is doing a story right now. They showed these guys:

http://www.rescueamericanjobs.org/

Code I'm with you 100%. I worked at a call center for MSN internet access. Microsoft has no employees at any of it's call centers. it's all private copmanies contracted by Microsoft. I can't tell you the number of times I had to hang up on abusive (not angry, abusive) customers but we were told that we had to take the abuse or risk getting fired. we were not allowed to pass it to a supervisor unless the customer specificly asked. In our center supervisors seldom if ever got on the phones. I got to play supervisor many times. I remember being on a call and the agent next to me was on a call and each of our customers wanted a supervisor. We just passed each other our headsets and took the calls. this is the website I built a couple years ago detailing how it really works. it's a little outdated but is still very acurate.

www.geocities.com/msncallcenters

For you Bush supporters out there, why doesn't he do something about this? I really want to know.

you honestly think a democrat or indepentant would stop it?? It's an issue of corporate greed, money, and special intrests. doesn't matter who's in office.

I actually work for an outsourcing company for Earthlink. There are some things that you people state that are just wrong. Earthlink does provide minimal, but FREE, tech support. Sups, real sups, are always available, and problems do get solved. The only BS thing that I can think of is that we are monitered by call time, which is what determines job security.
I don't like what Earthlink is doing, but hey, I still have a job, I get $10 an hour, and it keeps me happy. One thing that you people do not realize is that many of the techs you call in to know enough to fix your computer, they just can't do anything about it because the company doesn't support it. And because your computer is hosed, your OS is taking a crap, or you refuse to upgrade/update is no excuse to blame it on techs.... And I am a kid fresh out of High School going to college, but I DID grow up in the information age so I did self teach myself computers.

hamjay you are rightabout many things. some places do give you supervisors but many don't. check my link above. but supervisors can do no more for you than an agent.

You are right that there are a lot of people out there who screw up their OS and blame it on the ISP software. question are you allowed to tell a customer that they can set up their earthlink account throught DUN or do you have to tell them to use the software? unless earthlink has changed they can go online without software.

Earthlink may have many good points (as well as any callcenter) however the call center principle hurts overall customer service no matter what the companies tell you. As you pointed out, call time restrictions along with support boundries restrict the service a customer can get. Besides I still maintain over all that many of the techs in any tech support for internet access do not know a whole lot about the internal workings of a computer.

compmore....one of my funniest and truest memories, was one time, I really pissed off a customer...(everyone had to be on the phone that day as we were short handed)....they called back and got another tech...demanded to ask for a supervisor, and by that time, the calls had slacked a bit and I was doing superviser duties...he put his hands up for me to take the call as an escalated call...I recalled the person's voice from earlier....they started bitching about this rude tech they got earlier...I asked what his name was (knowing it was me)...and I told them...." That is really odd, because this is the first complaint I've ever had on him. He's one of our best techs..." . I finally got their issue resolved, but they never did know it was me.....

true story!

And there is a relation to this RIAA nonsense viz this outsourcing and the "jobless recovery" -- without jobs, people can't earn real money; without real money, they can't spend on items like CD's or DVD's, hence sales continue to go down, and the multinational entertainment-media complex (and their respective alphabet-soup lobbies) will repeat their Big Lie of "it's all piracy, stupid," and the vicious cycle will repeat itself yet again, with more calls for discriminatory, exclusionary "DRM" technology that would be used AGAINST us all, not to mention socialistic Big Government interference in various digital-based systems. In other words, it isn't so much "free music" as free trade that has brought CD sales plummeting.

Code. lol we could do a whole thread on this if not a website. check out my site, when I put it up Cyberrep management was so pissed they threatened to fire instantly anyone they saw who had that site on their screens. they went crazy trying to figure out who did it.

I must apologise for my parody. But after all it was just that. A parody. I used to work for ICL Sorbus support. Stuffed into my little cubicle working strange shifts and adhering to strict call times (We also had those nasty led boards on the walls) with an overseer on an elevated platform. We supported Escom PC's initially (Anyone who remembers them before they went belly up will know how shite they were. Good riddance to crap I say).

It was a horrible job and I was always catching flack from the management. I had to offload someone to a supervisor once. A mad abusive Scotsman who made me blow a circuit. It's not a nice job. Never again.

When companies outsource it's called a free market econonomy, but when people who need less expensive perscription drugs order from Canada it's called illegal... Makes you wonder who the government is actually working for, themselves... They called it "unsafe" to order from Canada, and we all know how canadian drugs are unsafe (sarcasm)....

great point Justin

Whats crazy is I almost was hired at the San Jose, Calif facility for Earthlink. Also, I had to get tech help from earthlink. It seemed kinda slow.

"I don't like what Earthlink is doing, but hey, I still have a job, I get $10 an hour, and it keeps me happy."

I think you missed the main point. They are outsourcing jobs. That maens you are less likely to get 10 dollars an hour. Which, unless I'm of a completely inverted rational, will make you unhappy.

Is it their right to do so? Ofcourse, it is supposed to be a free market. But as justin pointed out the balance of freedoms is dramitically shifted towards the firm and from the consumer. Why? I have no idea. But that does not negate the fact that something should be done about it. Our government is intended to maintain our society. We will not maintain and certainly not maintain a free economy as it was intended to be by its founders, if the balance of power continues to shift as it has.

Also this does have quite a bit to do with the RIAA. The problems we as consumers have with the RIAA are nothing more than a sympton of a serious disorder in our society.

"you honestly think a democrat or indepentant would stop it?? It's an issue of corporate greed, money, and special intrests. doesn't matter who's in office."

true, but if this continues someone will have to speak out against it to get votes.
I honestly just wanted to see what someone would say.
"I don't like what Earthlink is doing, but hey, I still have a job, I get $10 an hour, and it keeps me happy."
In MN you wouldn't be able to afford much sadly. If your happy thats cool, but i'd rather have high paying jobs here.

10 bucks an hour is pretty damn good for the area I live in. Most wages here are at or within a dollar of minimum which is 6.25. There are a lot of people here that realie on those 10/hour telemarketing jobs and pulling them out is only putting more people in the unemployment line.

Maybe we should just all leave this country and go to India, Mexico, Bangladesh or where ever. Atleast we'd have jobs

---The problems we as consumers have with the RIAA are nothing more than a sympton of a serious disorder in our society.

Why yes, people who think they have the right to steal anything digital they want.

Economists expected 150,000 new jobs to be created last quarter, but only 1,000 materialized.

I saw "free trade" for what it was 12 years ago...a corporate grab bag, the prize being cheap, sweatshop labor in foreign countries and the legitimizing of being disloyal to the country that allowed these companies to exist in the first place.

One particular argument for free trade that was made 12 years ago was this: Since offshore labor costs will be reduced (like $2.00 parts and labor to make a pair of tennis shoes in China, for example), the American consumer will benefit from lower costs. But after the NAFTA and GATT treaties passed, the American consumer was told "no, silly, the price of a product is NOT determined by labor costs...it's determined by the law of supply and demand" (hence tennis shoes are still as expensive as before these "free trade" treaties, even though the cost of making them has been reduced).

I guess when the CEO's and board member are a regular replacement with someone from India (Delphia can do this now). And, their bonuses get cut from it. Then it will be the the end of the 2 year wonders making stupid decisions like this. Of course if they don't do it one of the foreign subsidiaries of GE, GM etc will come up with the idea. "Short term business solutions create long term problems for a company."

"Why yes, people who think they have the right to steal anything digital they want. "

I think it is a bit deeper than that. I also see many more facits of the problem relating to much more than copyright issues. I personally do not feel that the people of this country are the root of all the problems. If they are than it is time the government and suppliers adjust to its people. Do you seriously think they can customize their consumer base to something they want? At the same time elliminating the peoples jobs. I ask this. How many people have lost their jobs due to copyright infringement? Now, how many people have lost their jobs due outsourcing and firms tightning their belts for the sheer sake of more profits?

Oh and while we are on the subject of misguided perceptions of rights. What gives producers the right to think they can use powerful psychological influence to make people buy their products at the highest posible prices. Prices that are high enough to break peoples wallets and cause parents to disappoint their children who are convinced due to the massive advertising campaings and other influences put on by those firms. What gives them the right to force us into a certain way of thought than strip us of cash simply because they can. And dont tell me its capitalism because what has been done goes far beyond capitalization.

I'll take that line of reasoning one step further, purfus...do you remember the controversy about the possibility of subliminal advertising on TV and at the movies? You know, the one where a picture frame is shown fast enough for the subconscious to pick up, but not the conscious mind? Would this form of influence be considered "marketing" and "capitalism" by most people? I think not...that smacks of mind control/manipulation to me. So why should TV and radio advertising be considered less sinister than subliminal advertising?

I managed to piss off Gateway so bad a few weeks ago they were considering canceling my service agreement. I called for aproblem I've been having ever since I was givin this computer, and I couldn't understand the m'f'er on the phone. I told him (her?) I wanted to speak to someone I could understand, and got transferred to some OTHER department. I was on the phone for an hour, and got no where, so I asked to speak to a supervisor, preferably someone who spoke English I could understand, w/o the Indian accent (so think I couldn't figure out half of what was bein said.
I was immediately transferred to yet ANOTHER supervisor (who spoke perfect English btw) who told me that if I was going to make "racist slurs and comments" to the techs that my contract would be canceled. I told em fat chance, as my service contract is part of a rather LARGE gov't contract for vets. I've not heard anything else yet, but the guy did suggest that I drive to Boston (3 hours) for my tech support from now on.
Go figger. I'm actually getting a local company to wipe this thing clean and buying my own version of XP, w/o all the gateway bullshit added in.
Point is, if they are going to outsource to other countries, then they should be willing to deal with customers who WANT tech support, who have (somehow anyway) paid for tech support, and want to be able to understand the solutions that are presented, crappy as they may be.
Since when did "profit" mean " a way to be compsensated forlack of service" ???
ttmmm