Telemarketing a jobs juggernaut: No. 1 producer since 1987
Publication: NPT - National Post
Source: INF - All CanWest Publications
May 26 01:00
Page: FP1 / Front
Section: Financial Post
OTTAWA - Those dinner-time calls may be annoying, but the telemarketing industry has been Canada's No. 1 producer of jobs -- by a wide margin -- for nearly 20 years, Statistics Canada said yesterday.
But the 92,000 call-centre jobs created since 1987 pay, on average, $12.45 an hour, or roughly one-third the national average. In addition, the wages are low even though more than two-thirds of telemarketing employees have some form of "respectable" education from a post-secondary institution.
The StatsCan report is one of the first looks at just how big the business support services (BSS) industry, which encompasses telemarketing and other tasks that companies have outsourced, has grown in Canada. Also, the study aims to paint of portrait of exactly who is employed at call centres. StatsCan found it is not who you may think.
Between 1987 and 2004, employment in the BSS sector soared 447%, from 20,000 to 112,000. This far surpasses job growth during the same time period for all services industries (37%) and for the Canadian economy (29%).
But 2004 marked the first year in which employment dropped in the industry. "Whether this is just a blip or a sign of peaking employment is still too early to tell," StatsCan said.
Two key factors have driven BSS growth. First, new information technologies mean tasks such as phone sales can be performed anywhere. This, along with the recent global economic downturn, has prompted a number of North American companies focused on cutting costs to look for suppliers who can deliver a similar level of service at a cheaper rate.
Besides Canada, there are other countries that have experienced, or are about to experience, strong growth in the call centres. In India, for example, the BSS market is set to grow nearly 10% a year until the decade is out.
But the low pay BSS workers earn must be of concern to politicians. A number of senior policy makers, most notably Industry Minister David Emerson and Bank of Canada governor David Dodge, have spoken at length about the need to create higher-paying jobs by boosting the country's lagging productivity growth.
About a quarter of all people employed in the BSS sector are in Atlantic Canada, in particular New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, and StatsCan indicates the region has continually attracted call-centre jobs at the expense of Quebec and the Prairies. Meanwhile, close to half of BSS jobs are in Ontario.
Atlantic Canada would have been attractive for BSS companies, StatsCan said, because unemployment in the region was high in the late 1980s.
The agency said workers' educational credentials in the BSS sector are similar to those found in other sectors of the Canadian economy, with slightly more than two-thirds, 67%, holding a degree from a post-secondary institution.
Furthermore, workers hold mostly full-time jobs
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