TO ALL CWU MEMBERS EMPLOYED IN BT.

The union's campaign against the export of jobs to India is attracting more publicity by the day.
Local branches are being at least as effective as headquarters in dealing with the issue.
The union has issued this brief on the situation in the event of branches or members being asked about job export by the media:

This brief has three parts

• The CWU position
  

• Background points to support this from our research department
  
• A web link that is useful (if disturbing)

 
PART ONE:
- A summary of the CWU Position

• BT intends to transfer 2,200 jobs abroad over the coming year. Why? Because (while still charging a UK customer 50p a minute) it can pay an Indian worker 80p an hour.
  

• This is only the tip of the ice-berg. In all, over 200,000 office-based jobs throughout the UK are at risk in just about every sector, but especially in call centres, banking and communications.
  
• the CWU has no issue with India or Indian workers. Our issue is with BT and other UK job exporters
  
• BT is a UK company that derives its profits from UK customers and is therefore obliged to support the UK economy by employing UK workers
  
• BT employees and agency staff have co-operated with major company downsizing initiatives and cost-cutting reorganisations. BT's proposal to now move work to India amounts to a huge slap to the whole BT/agency workforce.
  
• BT's cost arguments if applied across the company to all remote work-areas would result in the loss of tens of thousands of BT jobs. Such fears are reinforced by BT's blank refusal to consider any agreement limiting the amount of work transferred to India beyond 3 years.
  
• BT claims they are moving work to India in anticipation of possible similar moves by competitors. This we reject. To date none of BT's direct competitors have advanced plans to move significant chunks of work to India:
  
• BT will be setting a hugely dangerous trend by moving UK jobs dealing with domestic traffic to India. The consequences for the Telecoms and call-centre industry are massive: potentially hundreds of thousands of British jobs are at stake:
  
• savings made by moving work to India are minimal when compared to the billions the BT board lost whilst pursuing its recent ill-thought out overseas acquisition strategy. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that our members are being asked to pay for directors mistakes pay with their jobs:
  
• moving work to India will not benefit the customer. A person working in India will receive 70p an hour whilst BT will be still be raking in 40p a call:
  
• BT's initial response to our opposition was to claim that no BT jobs in the UK would be lost. Later, following CWU pressure, they amended this statement to say no agency jobs would be lost either. We regard these statements as entirely misleading. The vast bulk of the work BT proposes to move to India is currently done in the UK. Moreover if new jobs are created these should be offered to the BT workforce and to the thousands of loyal agency staff currently working to BT. Quite simply, every job created in India will be a job lost in the UK.

 
PART TWO

• a supplementary briefing produced by the CWU research department
  

• Call centres and business processing outsourcing (BPO) have become big business in India. What began as a trickle 8 years ago with a decision by General Electric to shift thousands of back-office jobs from America to India has become a flood.
  
• According to a study by consultants McKinsey, 203 of the Fortune 1000 companies already outsource to India. Attracted by cheap labour, BT has become the latest in a long list of household names - from companies as diverse as Prudential, P&O, British Airways, Citibank, Thames Water and Thomas Cook - that have sought to cut costs by outsourcing back-office operations, call centres and IT to a country where unemployment is three times the level of the UK.
  
• The study by McKinsey estimated that the global potential for BPOs in 2005 will be £150 billion, with India's share worth £15 bn (10%).
  
• The outsourcing of business processing to India is expected to grow for a third consecutive year by 60% (to $2.4 billion) this year. By 2008 the survey predicts that India will need more than 1 million call centre workers to meet demand.
  
• The financial services industry has been at the forefront of the outsourcing drive to India. American Express, Citibank, HSBC, Standard Chartered all have their own call centre operations in India and the process looks set to continue.
  
• A report by Deloitte Research estimated that $356 billion of cost for the global financial services industry will move offshore - much of it to India.
  
• Another study by Datamonitor predicts call centre relocation to countries in the Middle East and Africa will grow significantly over the next 5 years as UK companies look to outsource. It found that over a tenth of the 1.2 million call centre agents in the region were servicing employers in other countries - with this number set to double by 2007.
  
• As Vivek Paul, President of Wipro Technologies (India's largest IT company) has commented: "It's a basic economic law that companies will seek lower costs. Services are following the same path as manufacturing".
  
• According to management analyst Datamonitor: "a combined outsourcing model is emerging where companies keep high-value call centre activities in-house or in the same country, but are increasingly willing to move low-value, labour intensive work offshore".
  
• The seismic shift of labour from Europe and America has massive consequences for UK workers in the telecoms and call centre industries. As many as 200,000 jobs could be at risk over the next 10 years.
  
• There are currently 6,000 call centres in the UK employing almost half-a-million people (1.7% of the entire working population). The number of centres has surged in recent years, creating much-needed (though generally poorly-paid work) in areas where manufacturing jobs have been lost.
  
• According to Personnel Today: "overseas competition has put extra pressure on the UK based call centres to prove they can compete in terms of cost, service and technology. "Executives of call centres try to cut costs and increase profits, so they cut staff numbers, but they also want to keep customer complaints down. The result is firms end up with high stress levels and attrition rates among staff, which drive up costs, while service quality suffers". Instead of focusing on costs, companies should be looking at how to maximise the quality of service they offer by providing better training, comfortable working environments and better management. That will improve staff motivation, increase productivity and lower attrition rates - thus cutting costs.
  
• However, while call centres have undergone a massive expansion in recent years, a recent report by Mitial Research predicts a sharp decline - partly as a result of competition from low wage rivals such as India. The report says a third of Britain's larger call centres will close by 2005, triggering about 90,000 job losses.
  
• Thousands of jobs are at threat in BT. The company has announced plans to move 2,200 jobs to Bangalore by the end of next year. Staff will be paid just 80p an hour compared with £6 in Britain - that equates to £3,000 a year instead of £15,000 in the UK.
  
• Moreover, if BT's cost arguments were applied across the company to all remote work areas, this would result in the loss of tens of thousands of BT jobs - engineering, clerical and operator. These fears are reinforced by BT's blank refusal to consider any agreement limiting the amount of work transferred to India beyond 3 years.
  
• The CWU have made clear that we have no argument with India or Indian workers. Our issue is with BT.
  
• BT is a UK company that derives its profits from UK customers and is therefore obliged to support the UK economy by employing UK workers.
  
• BT employees and agency staff have cooperated with major company downsizing initiatives and cost-cutting reorganisations. Proposals to now move work to India amounts to a huge slap in the face to the whole BT/agency workforce.
  
• But CWU is not alone in calling for an end to the export of jobs. Amicus and banking union UniFi - whose members are also in the frontline - have added their weight to the campaign to prevent the exodus of jobs from UK service industries.
  
• The CWU has sought to exploit every avenue to stop work moving to India. That has included:
  - lobbies, demonstrations and protests;
  - a high-profile media campaign;
  - lobbying various politicians and political parties;
  - getting the issue raised in the House of Commons, the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly;
  - raising our concerns with Oftel and various government ministries; and
  - developing a coordinated strategy with the TUC and other unions facing similar threats.

 
PART THREE
This is an interesting link about jobs exported to India by UK and US companies. If you find other interesting links, please let us know at info@cwu.org

www.bpoindia.org/companies