From the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer
BOWIE, Md. - From her home office in the suburbs, Susan Smith is part of a growing movement that may help stem the flow of American jobs to low-cost Asia.
Within a decade, some 3.3 million service-sector jobs will be offshored, or shipped to countries with low labor costs, according to a projection by Forrester Research, a consulting firm.
But Smith is part of a parallel movement called “homeshoring.” Instead of moving offshore, call-center jobs like hers are going to home-based U.S. workers, and software programming jobs are moving to low-cost U.S. metro areas such as Oklahoma City or rural Greenville, N.C., instead of to India.
“It just makes a lot of sense. It’s like having American-made cars vs. foreign-made cars. You want to keep the work within the United States,” said Smith, who takes phone orders over her computer from 9 p.m. to midnight after putting her toddler to bed.
Low-cost airline JetBlue pioneered the concept in 2000 with home-based reservation agents. It has since spread to retailers like Office Depot, roadside-assistance providers like AAA and even to the Internal Revenue Service.
For decades, corporations have struggled to lower costs by farming out tasks ranging from help desks and product design to payroll management. In today’s global economy, the battle is over where those jobs go.
If offshore jobs tend to offer cheaper labor, homeshoring’s big advantage is that there’s virtually no capital expense for offices, parking lots, cafeterias and other employee amenities, not to mention benefits. Workers even provide their own computers.
Today, from the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., Smith takes sales calls for a distributor of public broadcasting DVDs. She’s one of 3,000 home-based agents in 34 states working in a virtual call center operated by WillowCSN of Miramar, Fla.
“You are tapping whole new labor markets - military spouses, stay-at-home parents, retirees,” said John Edwards, the chairman of the Telecommuting Coalition, which advocates home-based work.
Virtual call-center agents in the United States are generally 35 to 40 years old, work 20 to 30 hours a week and earn $10 to $16 an hour, plus bonuses. Some virtual call centers offer bare-bones health insurance; others don’t.
As homeshoring grows, offshoring also is accelerating. And it’s no longer just call centers and information technology jobs. Now it’s architects, accountants, tax preparers and financial analysts.
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