My Job Was Shipped Overseas

Jamone Ross, a former call center worker at T-Mobile who lost his job in 2012 when T-Mobile shipped his job overseas, wrote a piece for The Hill about the impact of offshoring on American workers:

Back in 2011, I was a call center worker with T-Mobile in Brownsville, Texas. It wasn’t an easy job — customer service never is — but I made good money, $18.25 an hour. I had just gotten married, and my wife and I had bought a brand-new house. It felt like we were well on our way toward building our own American dream.

Unfortunately, what seems like a dream can sometimes turn into a nightmare.

My colleagues and I knew something was up. First, T-Mobile started cutting our hours. Then we started getting strange calls in which customers were complaining that they’d been connected to foreign customer service representatives who couldn’t answer their questions. The company sent us memos telling us how to respond to the influx of calls from angry customers.

That was bad enough, but it got worse when T-Mobile started firing workers in droves for small infractions that in the past would never have caused someone to lose their job. We went from 900 to 500 people in my call center in a short period of time. Those of us who were left were walking on eggshells. Every day, we were wondering who would be next out the door.

We got the answer in 2012: all of us.

T-Mobile shut down seven call centers across the country and laid off 3,300 workers, including me. Suddenly, those strange calls made sense. It seemed T-Mobile, which gets millions of dollars in contracts from the U.S. government, had decided that U.S. workers were simply too expensive.

Read the full piece here.