While Millions of Americans Are Without Jobs, Federal Government Trains Foreigners For English Speaking Call Center Jobs.

USAID Information Officer Andie De Arment shows American aid for flood victims to media representatives at Karachi airport on August 16, 2010

While the president has been urging “insourcing,” the government has been sending money to the Philippines to train foreign workers for jobs in English-speaking call centers.

According to New York Democratic Rep. Tim Bishop and North Carolina Republican Rep. Walter Jones, this is unacceptable and “shocking.”

The pair are calling on the United States Agency for International Development to immediately suspend what is known as the Job Enabling English Proficiency (JEEP) program.

According to Jone’s office, in 2010, after the two men compelled USAID to end a similar training program in Sri Lanka, the agency assured the congressmen that they would “conduct a review to ensure the project will not take any jobs away from Americans.”

In a letter to the USAID administrator, Rajiv Shah, Bishop and Jones expressed their displeasure at learning of the effort they thought the agency had explicitly promised against.

“I believe it was reasonable to conclude from that statement that your agency’s outsourcing training program was terminated, particularly in light of President Obama’s ‘insourcing’ initiative announced earlier this year,” the pair wrote. “Therefore, I was shocked to learn that USAID has used taxpayer dollars to invest in outsourcing training programs in the Philippines at the expense of American workers.”.

According to Bishop, more than 4.5 million Americans currently work in call centers, but since 2007 more than 500,000 call center jobs have been outsourced to foreign countries. MORE

thank you for the above  Legionarul 

Let’s also not forget many of these jobs are farmed out to Prisons in the U.S.

Prison Call Centers Put Squeeze on Service Sector

by LAURA SULLIVAN  February 23, 2005

A generation ago, prisoners just made license plates. Later, inmates began making shoes, clothing, furniture — even soap.

But now prisons are going farther. Several years ago, the federal prison system started offering customer-service calling centers. Inmates sit in a small, guarded room taking orders for goods and products and handling shipping questions. A few states have followed suit and opened their own call centers.

Most of the centers handle orders for items the prisoners are making themselves and deal almost exclusively with the non-profits and government agencies that are allowed to buy their goods. But in a few cases, prisons have offered their call centers’ services to private companies on the outside who want to outsource their own departments. The companies say they would have sent the centers overseas if they hadn’t given the business to the prisons.

The move has not been without controversy. The federal prisons’ efforts to expand into calling centers through its company, Federal Prison Industries, has caught the eye of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which receives calls weekly about the issue.

Inmates at Greene Correctional Institution in Coxsackie, N.Y., staff a state Department of Motor Vehicles call center.

Inside the secret industry of inmate-staffed call centers

When you call a company or government agency for help, there’s a good chance the person on the other end of the line is a prison inmate.

The federal government calls it “the best-kept secret in outsourcing” — providing inmates to staff call centers and other services in both the private and public sectors.

The U.S. government, through a 75-year-old program called Federal Prison Industries, makes about $750 million a year providing prison labor, federal records show.

The Justice Department and the U.S. Bureau of Prisons don’t break down which companies they do business with. But Unicor said inmates provide private call center service, including data review and sales lead generation, for “some of the top companies in America” under a federal mandate to help companies repatriate jobs they have outsourced overseas.

In a fact sheet, Unicor asserts that prisoners in the program are less likely to re-offend and are better trained for full-time work upon release. All revenue goes back into the program, which “operates at no cost to the taxpayer,” it says.

For inmates, the appeal isn’t the pay, which can be as low as 50 cents an hour. It’s the training and the opportunity: “A lot of times, we need to feel like we are appreciated, and it builds self-esteem,” John Howard of Brooklyn, N.Y., an inmate at Greene, told WNYT.