US: Legislation to ban loan for companies outsourcing call centre jobs

, Aug 3: In a Congress legislation, issued by a bipartisan group of six US lawmakers, corporations that send US call-centre jobs overseas (including India) are banned from federal grants and loans for three years.

Introduced by Congressman Tim Bishop, this is supported by Dave McKinley, Chris Gibson, Gene Green, Mike Grimm, and Mike Michaud.

The legislation further mandates overseas call-centre employees to disclose their location to the US consumers and gives them the option of talking to a US-based call centre upon request. Furthermore, the US department of labour can track organizations that outsource their call-centres and ban them from all forms of federal loans and guarantees for 3 years.

On the other hand, the legislation assures restored tax payer assistance for companies that return their calls to the US.

"If you bet against America and outsource jobs, American taxpayers turn their back on you--it's that simple. Our strong bipartisan coalition speaks with one voice, only good corporate citizens who grow jobs in America deserve taxpayer support," Bishop said.

"Our number one priority in Congress is not only creating but keeping American jobs, and this bill could help save thousands of them, we should not mandate that companies keep all of their call centres here in America and we also don't have to help them finance the off-shoring of American jobs by providing them with federal funds," said McKinley.

The move is supported by 700,000-member Communications Workers of America. More so, because of the increasing incidences of breach of information in the outsourced company. According to a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers study, approximately 83 per cent of outsourcing companies in India had information security breaches in the previous year.

"Indian call centre companies are also sub-outsourcing work to developing countries with potentially corrupt or unstable governance, like Egypt, Mexico, the Czech Republic, China and Thailand complicating efforts to identify and prosecute fraud," said a statement issued by the Bishop's office.

OneIndia News (with agency inputs)