Title: Jobs in the "new" economy
It's sad that this industry, aptly achronymed
"BSS" is our engine of growth. It's even sadder, I find, that a large
proportion of the people whose economic role is little more than to annoy us at
dinnertime are well educated, holding post secondary degrees. Are we
becoming a flim-flam economy, one in which something that was once seen as a
thing of value has become a carnival item, cheap and tawdry? One has to
wonder how the "productivity" of BSS employees is measured - by their take-home
pay I suppose. Yet because their product is mostly annoyance, should what
they earn perhapsnot be deducted from GNP?
My daughter, a student,took a BSS job last
summer. She didn't last - much too shy and too easily bruised by the rude
people she called. Her hours were 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. Many of her
coworkers had already put in part days or even full days at other minimum wage
jobs and were doing BSS just to make enough to keep themselves
going.
It makes one wonder about the vulnerability of
our young people. What if people got sufficiently annoyed at BSS calls to
persuade politicians to pass legislation to prohibit or severely restrict
it? That they already have to do BSS suggests that there isn't much room
for them elsewhere in the economy. It really makes you wonder where we are
going.
Ed
- Original Message -
From:
Cordell, Arthur: ECOM
To: FUTUREWORK (E-mail)
Sent: Thursday, May 26, 2005 7:47
PM
Subject: [Futurework] Jobs in the "new"
economy
Telemarketing a jobs juggernaut: No.
1 producer since 1987Publication:
NPT - National PostSource: INF - All CanWest PublicationsMay 26 01:00
Page: FP1 / FrontSection:
Financial PostOTTAWA - 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 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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