The call centers are everywhere: In Miami, there's Precision Response, a giant customer-service and fulfillment center operation owned by TV mogul Barry Diller's USA Networks. In Orlando, Connextions.net provides order-fulfillment services to Internet vendors. Jacksonville and Tampa, both with 40,000-plus call-center jobs, have built significant pieces of their economies around back-office operations. And as the pool of available workers in the call-center capitals has become shallower, Florida's slower-growing regions and rural counties are trying to plug in as well.
Economic developers have acknowledged that the jobs usually don't pay a lot or offer much in the way of benefits or career tracks. But they've defended the back-office operations because they absorb low-skill workers, which Florida's substandard educational system delivers in abundance, and because the industry is both "clean" and growing. The jobs have also improved somewhat in quality: As the demand for workers has increased, companies have had to nudge up pay and add perks such as fitness and day-care centers.
The real problem with call-center jobs has never been pay or perks, however. It's portability -- if a company finds a lower-cost location, all it needs to do is unplug the phones and computers and call a moving van. That's why the jobs are in Florida in the first place. Labor here sells for less.
And while call centers -- because of the language barrier -- might seem immune from the overseas competition that has threatened other service-sector jobs like encoding and computer programming, that may not even be true much longer.
A report on the Marketplace public radio program recently detailed how companies that employ hundreds of customer-service agents and call-center workers are now setting up shop in the Philippines.
Filipinos pride themselves on their English skills -- and many have them. Those skills, along with advances in telephone and computer technology, are making the country an instant base for call centers. Outside Manila, Marketplace reported, an outfit called Advanced Contact Solutions employs 200 young workers, all with college degrees, answering technical and billing questions 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The company's CEO, a Californian, said not a single caller had inquired as to where a call-center worker was based. (Even if some slight accent is detectable, how different is it really from the polyglot of mumble-mouth you now hear calling at dinnertime to sell you long-distance service or aluminum siding?)
America Online, which has a big call center in Jacksonville, just opened a 600-worker call center at the former U.S. air base north of Manila. Arthur Andersen, which has operations in Florida, including a software development center in Sarasota, also operates a center near Manila employing some 500 Filipino software engineers and tech-support workers at the heady rate of $15 a day. That's plenty enough to boost the standard of living in a country where the minimum wage is $3 a day.
As the Marketplace report correctly pointed out, call centers appear to be following the same path as low-skill manufacturing sectors like textiles. The migration of the textile industry from the Northeast through the South and then overseas in the past century-plus has been well-chronicled. TREND has reported recently on how the last outposts of the textile industry in small towns in north Florida are breathing their final gasps.
Not many foreign countries have the same critical mass of English-speakers as the Philippines, and language will continue to be a barrier to mobility. But for a foreign country looking for ways to boost its economic fortunes, increasing the portion of the citizenry who are fluent in English isn't expensive -- and wouldn't take long. Latin American countries, with both cultural and geographic proximity to Miami, could exploit that strategy within a decade.
Don't worry, Jacksonville and Tampa. It's unlikely all those phone jobs will unplug and flee to parts unknown within the next few years. But it's not hard to see that down the road, as happened with manufacturing (and agriculture), global competition for low-skill jobs is going to take a whack at another piece of Florida's economic base. Whether the competition comes from Mississippi or Bangkok, call-center recruitment is a bottom-feeding economic strategy, and the state will pay for it in the long run.
It's yet another reason to keep work force training and education as front-burner issues. Trying to compete in the global economy with a low-end labor force is a no-win proposition. Getting smart about education may be Florida's biggest hangup.