Veteran Cranston politics reporter Scott Mayerowitz (we only train the best!) tells the disturbing story of state benefits administration jobs that are being outsourced to India. Scott did some of his state-by-state research in Rhode Island, and learned that we, too, have farmed out many of our state’s call center jobs to India, though some calls are reportedly now being handled “domestically.” From ABC News:
[…]Other states struggled to answer questions about their call center locations.
“Who would have ever thought it would be such a difficult question to answer,” said Amy Kempe, spokeswoman for the governor’s office in Rhode Island. She eventually learned that JP Morgan was sending the state’s food stamps calls to India but now keeps them all domestically.
Kempe later told ABC News however that JP Morgan was still routing calls for unemployment benefits to India. Unemployment in Rhode Island now stands at 10.5 percent.
Does anyone else see the irony here? Should we laugh or cry?
Kmareka.com 
There’s no political glory in keeping Rhode Islanders employed that compares to bragging about how you cut spending.
Look, I work in the belly of the beast, and the company that employs me has moved jobs to India.
Want to know a secret? It don’t always save that much money. It may have been a great idea 10 years ago, but turnover and competition have made serious inroads into the cost benefit structure.
And then there’s the double whammy. Cutting jobs onshore means less money circulating in our economy, which cuts into state revenue (lower sales & income tax revenues, higher unemployment benefits), which leads to more cut backs, which further decreases revenue…
You get the idea.
This may be counterintuitive, but falling prices are much worse for the economy than rising prices. Anyone who lived throught the 1970s/1980s may find that hard to believe, but, trust me, the deflation of the period 1929-1933 was much worse.
I called the Dept of Health for the State of Rhode Island How come they have people with spanish accents answering the phone and How com most of the spokesman for that department is usually a doctor from a foreign country when most of this state speaks English?
FYI – When you call the State Government phone line. It is answered by 2 of the best girls ever. They are smart and they do more than just answer phones. They are learning new skills in the IT field as well. The 2 girls are from the Year Up program, which gives under privileged woman the opportunity to learn new skills and to be productive members of society instead of sitting home and collecting welfare. I am very happy that the state changed its off shoring policy and brought these jobs back to RI