Wasting Time With Alex

Thursday, March 27, 2008

I call Bullshit!

OK, let me start off by saying that I am a hard core believer in the freedom of the market and that government has overburdened ours with costly and ridiculous regulations that do more harm than good, but when I read what the CEO of AT&T had to say about getting skilled workers, I just had to call bullshit. Walk through this exercise with me for a second, and you will see why.

SAN ANTONIO, Texas (Reuters) - The head of the top U.S. phone company AT&T Inc (T.N) said on Wednesday it was having trouble finding enough skilled workers to fill all the 5,000 customer service jobs it promised to return to the United States from India.

“We’re having trouble finding the numbers that we need with the skills that are required to do these jobs,” AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson told a business group in San Antonio, where the company’s headquarters is located.

So far, only around 1,400 jobs have been returned to the United States of 5,000, a target it set in 2006, the company said, adding that it maintains the target.

The jobs in question are customer service jobs. Basically the person that gets the job answers phone calls by customers with issues, complaints, or requests for new business. Now this guy wants us to believe that a job that ranked so low on priority that AT&T figured it could drastically cut the cost of these customer services by outsourcing it to people that didn’t even have English as their primary language suddenly has a problem being filled here in the US? Think about that. The reason these jobs went overseas was simply because AT&T figured that it was not a priority with them and that as long as they could get someone cheap, they where fulfilling their obligations to the customers.

Now I am not trying to cast aspersions on the people that got these jobs. They are often very capable and hard working people. The problem was that most Americans had trouble talking to someone that they had a hard time understanding and that got turned off from companies that implemented this practice. AT&T is bringing these jobs back, not because it feels it is a good financial choice, unless you look at the fact that it directly affects their bottom line when customers walk because of their outsourcing practices, or even because it thinks these workers have not done a good job - frankly I think, and I speak from my own personal experience in IT, that the higher ups making these decisions often do not care about this quality as long as they can finagle it to show that they cut costs - but because they are losing business. now stay with me.

Stephenson said he is especially distressed that in some U.S. communities and among certain groups, the high school dropout rate is as high as 50 percent. “If I had a business that half the product we turned out was defective or you couldn’t put into the marketplace, I would shut that business down,” he said. Gone are the days when AT&T and other U.S. companies had to hire locally, he said.

I will be the first to admit that our high schools, especially in the urban communities which tend to be very liberal, in general have abysmal results, often because the people involved do not care about getting an education. Too many people have been told that there is nothing they can do to make the American dream happen for them because the system is rigged against them. The result is that most of them simply do not take advantage of the most important thing anyone hoping to get ahead in life needs: a good education. Couple that with schools that also do not care and peer pressure against those that do try to get an education, and you get the picture. No doubt about the fact that no company in the world other than the government or unionized teachers could get away with this kind of results. But even with that fact in mind, I can not help but call Bullshit! on this assessment. What kind of skills other than some basic reading, the ability to talk, and some good manners & people skills are necessary to do customer service? In fact the most important thing to do a customer service job is the ability to communicate with people effectively, and no school will teach you that in my opinion.

I am not sure he slipped up when he pointed out that no company had to hire locally anymore, but nobody should miss that. Our global world has made it possible for people in another company to do a job much cheaper than people here in the US. That is why these jobs went offshore. It was a conscious choice by AT&T driven not by their desire to provide better customer service, but by financials. This CEO is pissed because the people that pay for his product showed their displeasure at his company’s decision to use outsourcing to provide customer service used their ability to make a choice as well by taking their business somewhere else. Guess he doesn’t like others exercising their ability to choose either.

Stephenson said neither he nor most Americans liked the situation, and the solution was a stronger U.S. focus on education and keeping jobs. Business needed to help, such as AT&T’s repatriation of service positions and education grants, he added.

Now, I am all for America’s businesses to start forcing the current educational system to change and produce more capable people. The education system could use a healthy dose of the real world. Co-opted by the left with an agenda to create better collectivist drones at the cost of a real education, our students remain woefully unprepared for the job market of today where high tech demands skills. But please do not try to bullshit us about that being the case for customer service jobs. How freaking hard is it to answer a phone or work a computer? Maybe the issue is that AT&T also outsourced their IT work and now the quality of that is so lacking that they need much more skilled people to do the job of dealing with the constant issues?

Nah, do not get fooled. Their decision to outsource was based on money only. They thought they where going to save a big amount of cash by paying Amit 20 cents an hour over paying Tom $8 or more dollars an hour. When the AT&T customers showed their displeasure in a way that hit their pocket books, they had to rethink this cost cutting effort. The only problem is that they do not like having to pay people here that much for that kind of low skilled job. And that is why they are having a hard time moving the jobs back here. Not because of lack of capable people. It is because of lack of capable people that will do the jobs for peanuts. This guy Stephenson is not really helping us address the issue of how our schools are failing us as a society by trying to bamboozle us into thinking customer service jobs are high skill. In fact he is outright hurting it by trying to hide the fact AT&T would prefer to keep these jobs where it is cheap for financial reasons but is forced to change that because their customers do not want it.