Remember back in June when the Washington Post ran a story that all but accused Mitt Romney of sending jobs to China while he was the head of Bain Capital? The Romney campaign pushed back, and the exchange got heated enough so that the WaPo’s ombudsman weighed-in, albeit tepidly. The story largely fizzled but the idea that Romney has shipped jobs abroad is now a part of the Obama campaign’s ad narrative.
Last Thursday, the same WaPo ombudsman took to the page to respond to a raft of reader complaints about outsourcing. Specifically, the Washington Post’s outsourcing of its customer service department to the Philippines:
Most people who complain to me about the outsourced customer service would rather have Americans doing this work. In a time of 8 percent unemployment, so would I. But honestly that’s not going to happen. The Post is in cost-cutting mode, as it must be until a new economic model is found that will finance print, Web, mobile, and tablet editions of The Post. Outsourcing is vastly cheaper.
Many years ago these functions used to be in-house. Then they were outsourced to companies with call centers in rural parts of the United States where wages were lower. Then they went to Asia. Today, circulation managers here in the District say that since customer service was outsourced to the company in Asia, the number of complaints has trended downward significantly.
I know it seems odd that someone half a world away who doesn’t know the difference between Northeast and Northwest is handling your account. But really, it takes just a few seconds for an electronic transaction, and the service representatives in the Philippines are almost all college graduates for whom this job is a lifeline and a big step ahead. The workers there have instant access via e-mail and computer to your account and to your distributor and carrier back here in the Mid-Atlantic. The distributors and carriers get the complaint from the Philippines instantly on their mobile phones even while they’re still out delivering papers in the morning.
Better, cheaper service? Oh the horror of it all.
Still, as the WaPo ombudsman said in his earlier foray into the Romney/Bain/outsourcing flap, whether you think this a good or bad idea “depends on your politics.” I do not expect the Obama campaign to expand its ad narrative to include the grasping, miserly one percenters running the Post for sending American jobs abroad. That just doesn’t fit. Nor should we expect the Obama campaign to tweak the New York Times for how it treats its unionized workers.
But we will make note of it.
