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Phone calls fielded by customer service operators in India helped late night TV comics crystalize the latest wave of opposition to U.S. jobs flowing offshore.
Hardly noticed is another offshoot of the trend: U.S. call center jobs being outsourced to near-shore countries.
Near-shore is the latest buzzword making the international trade circuit. It refers to Mexico and the Caribbean Basin. The number of call center jobs in Caribbean islands almost doubled to more than 20,000 in the past two years.
That's peanuts compared with the 2.4-million call center jobs in the United States or even the tens of thousands in the Tampa Bay area. But the near-shore numbers are forecast to keep snowballing while U.S. call center jobs shrink.
"While media attention focused on call centers in India, that country is really making more of an impact on U.S. jobs in software applications," said Philip Dickenson Peters, chief executive of Zagada Markets Inc., a Coral Gables company that monitors overseas market strategies. "Meanwhile a lot of call center operators have been quietly moving into the Caribbean."
Zagada helped organize a network of 14 near-shore call centers that are partnered with such U.S. companies as Verizon and Microsoft. They were joined last week by another convert, Precision Marketing Corp., a South Florida call center operation owned by Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp, the corporate parent of HSN in St. Petersburg that runs a big call center network itself.
PRC, which employs 6,000 at call centers in Florida and 4,000 more in places as scattered as India and the Philippines, will set up shop in the Dominican Republic.
The reasons are plentiful. The islands' tourist industry experience has made the English-speaking population communications-savvy with both Latin and U.S. consumers. The technological infrastructure is in place. Wages are a lot cheaper.
Including equipment, the cost of running a call center in the United States is $25 to $30 an hour. It's $14 to $18 an hour in Jamaica, $12 to $13 an hour in Mexico and $9 to $11 an hour in India and Caribbean islands such as the Dominican Republic, according to Zagada.