THE PLANE from Bangalore touched down last month and off stepped a group of trainees headed for The Boston Globe -- here only briefly for job training before going back to India and taking 45 Massachusetts jobs with them.
What kind of sense does this make? Not
much. According to whom? According to the Globe and The
Both papers have recently run stories about
"backsourcing" -- the term used when business-savvy corporations that
care about both customer service and the American economy pull back from
shipping their jobs overseas and rehire locally. So who are these starry-eyed
idealists who care enough to bring their jobs back to the United States? Dell
Inc.,
The fact is that outsourcing is a business trend that is reaching its end and being reversed by companies that care both about their customers and their regional economies. In the two newspapers' stories, business leaders talked about customer unhappiness when they are confronted with outsourced employees who don't understand where the caller is from or what his needs are. While the 45 Globe jobs going to Bangalore do not include positions with direct contact with customers, representatives from these corporations also addressed both the perception and the reality that moving jobs overseas hurts US workers and the economy.
The New York Times Co., owner of the Globe, recently announced the elimination of more than 120 jobs at the New England Media Group, which includes the Globe -- continuing a trend that has severed the most experienced workers from the paper over the last decade. In one of the latest assaults, 45 jobs in back office finance are being outsourced to India. The job cuts came less than one month after Boston Newspaper Guild members agreed to make concessions -- no guaranteed wage increases and significantly higher employee healthcare costs -- in order to help the struggling paper.
In a particularly cruel addition of insult to injury, Globe staffers have been asked to train their new "colleagues" from India, who are shuttled to the Globe building by taxi from their nearby hotel accommodations.
Tucked into these workers' luggage for the trip back east: Promotional Globe placards to place on their desks 8,000 miles away to make them feel like they're in Boston.
This outsourcing comes as local leaders across the political, business, and civic spectrum are expressing concerns about the direction and the quality of The Boston Globe. At the heart of those concerns is the idea that our premier local newspaper, the foundation of our communication identity, is losing its way.
There are strong business arguments to rescind the outsourcing at the Globe -- as Dell and others have shown. And there are strong civic arguments not to send jobs overseas. But there is also a human element at play here, one that the Globe of family-ownership days would never have ignored.
If it doesn't make sense for Comcast or Dell, it certainly doesn't make sense for The Boston Globe. Bad business decisions have dogged the Globe over the last 10 years and helped push circulation and revenues steadily downward. It's time the paper's owners turned to their own business pages and followed the lead of more savvy corporate thinkers. It's time to give local people back the jobs they are sending to Bangalore.
Robert Haynes is president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO. Jeremy Crockford is a public relations consultant who represents both the state AFL-CIO and the Boston Newspaper Guild.