[Opinion] Call Centers

This is from an episode of the popular U.S. sitcom ‘Friends,’ which has also been a huge hit in Korea. Phoebe - a cute, nice, but rather eccentric leading actress - gets a job as a consultant at a call center regarding computer products. Her job is to answer customer inquiries and promote sales over the phone. In a friendly manner, Phoebe answers the phone with, “How may I help you?” The man on the other side brusquely gives his reply, “I’m going to kill myself.” No matter how thoroughly Phoebe searches the consultant manual, she could not find a standard response for this particular type of call. She could just hang up, but warm-hearted Phoebe could not ignore the man. The episode happily ends with Phoebe finding the caller and preventing him from committing suicide.

However, even for an angel like Phoebe, the chances of this happening in real life are rare. U.S. corporations have continually moved their call centers to areas that provide lower income and have recently gone as far as building their call centers abroad. Omaha, a U.S. city in the Northeast, has been hailed as an ideal place for call centers due to their friendly dialect but those days are over. If you call customer services at General Electric or Delta Airlines, chances are you will be connected to a consultant in India. India is rapidly rising as an attractive outsourcing district in the global era, for it provides English speaking employees one tenth the labor costs of an American.

Call centers can be seen as a kind of manufacturing business center where you ‘produce’ products over the phone. Moving factories to districts with low production costs and high competitiveness is in line with the big flow of globalization. More and more businesses, mostly manufacturers, from the U.S. are moving overseas, resulting in a 15 percent disappearance of jobs being landed abroad. It is not only manufacturers; white-collar workers in the technology and investment sectors, including Microsoft, Boeing and Morgan Stanley employees, are losing their jobs to competitors abroad. Therefore, a peculiar phenomenon where unemployment rates are increasing despite the reviving economy, is taking hold of the U.S.

Korean Kookmin Bank has also been considering moving their call center to China in order to lighten its labor cost burdens. The average wage of a Korean worker is 1.3 million won monthly, while a Chinese worker would only require 1,000 Chinese Yuan (130,000 won) at most. Therefore, profits are made even when communications costs are taken into account. Although there have been many instances of factories being moved abroad due to high labor costs, it is significant and surprising that businesses in the service industry, such as banks, are also starting to relocate overseas. Now, not only do we have to compete with unskilled low wage foreign workers but also skilled foreign workers. This could lead to a country empty of corporations and factories but full of the unemployed. It is no longer possible to survive with a narrow viewpoint of the world. Today, the whole world is in competition.

Kim Sun-deok, Editorial Writer, yuri@donga.com