A Town's Future Is Leaving the Country
Mar 28, 2004 Top Stories - Los Angeles Times
By David Streitfeld Times Staff Writer
CLINTWOOD, Va. - This remote Appalachian town doesn't get many visitors, but every day it sends thousands of travelers on their way. If you buy an airline ticket off the Travelocity website and need to call with a change or a question, the phone rings here.
The Travelocity call center brought 250 jobs to a community wounded
by the decline of coal mining, its mainstay for a century. It
plugged the town's 1,500 residents into the global high-tech
economy, offering the prospect of a secure future.
That illusion crumbled last month when Travelocity fired Clintwood,
saying it would close the call center by year-end and move all the
jobs to India. The Internet, far from being the town's salvation, is
threatening it with collapse.
Opened fewer than three years ago, the center is the largest private
employer in the county. "I figured it would be here forever, like Wal-Mart," said Greg
Owens, 29, who joined Travelocity after being laid off from a job at
a private school in northern Virginia.
"Most of us are just praying
for something else to come in." The closing of the call center in Clintwood and two others in nearby
towns demonstrates American companies' increasing efforts to
outsource jobs to India, the Philippines, Russia, Malaysia and other
far-flung places.
As high-speed data cables wire the world, locales with cheap labor can gain jobs - and those with expensive labor can lose them. The call center clerks in Clintwood start at $8 an hour. In India, their replacements will earn less than a quarter of that.
These towns' struggles also show some of the difficulties that many
communities will encounter if, as experts predict, outsourcing
continues to grow. More than a quarter of the 2.25 million
call-center jobs in the U.S. are expected to go offshore.
The towns are painfully learning that they need to develop jobs,
companies and resources that can't be easily relocated. But that
isn't a simple mission for low-wage, low-skilled workforces like
those in Appalachia. Like much of rural America, the area has seen a
brain drain for decades.
Some critics see no hope. "Unless we can reverse some of these trade inequalities, the working class will simply be ruined. They'll flip burgers, go on welfare or sell drugs," said Lewis Loflin, an adjunct professor at Virginia Highlands Community College in nearby Abingdon who runs a website criticizing the region's failed efforts at economic development.
Corporations have been moving U.S. factories to other countries for
decades, but the trend has only recently caught on with office
workers like those in Clintwood.
Many economists contend that
so-called offshoring is healthy, that dollars paid to workers in
other countries ultimately return to America to be spent on goods
and services.
By reducing costs, outsourcing also allows companies to lower prices, which benefits consumers. In theory, at least, companies will take their savings on labor and use the money to expand, which should ultimately include more hiring in the U.S. All this is cold comfort for tens of millions of office workers, many of whom feel vulnerable. In this election year, offshoring has blossomed into a potent issue.
Until recently, Appalachian towns such as Clintwood were an outsourcing destination, not a victim. Companies that wanted to cut costs could hardly find a cheaper place in America. With that salary of $8 an hour plus benefits - something almost unknown in these parts for entry-level jobs - Travelocity had no trouble attracting employees.
Amanda Rose, a 19-year-old college student, left a clothing store
for Travelocity. But before she could start, the Internet company
announced the shutdown.
Her old job already had been filled. "I had
a pretty good job, then here comes this great job, and two days
later I have nothing," Rose said. "It's hard to find a job in
Dickenson County. It's so hard. There aren't any opportunities for
younger people."
The disappearance of Travelocity will send more young people like Rose to such cities as Knoxville, Tenn., and Roanoke, Va., further eroding the fabric of the community. "We're becoming more and more Third World here," said Bill Deel, a retired English teacher. "The best and the brightest leave."
The joke among the town's citizens is that the only secure jobs are at the new state prison, because they're not going to be shipping the convicts to India anytime soon. There are several new lockups around the county, which a lot of people have mixed feelings about.
"It's not quite as bad as being a nuclear waste dump site," said John Clay Stanley, director of the Dickenson County Chamber of Commerce (news - web sites). "But we're the dumpsite for human misery."
Even with the Travelocity jobs, Dickenson County was in a precarious position. With a population of 16,000 and falling, the county leads Virginia in the wrong statistics. Per-capita income here is half the state average, but the suicide rate is 66% higher. Unemployment is in the double digits.
Like most community officials, Stanley refuses to be pessimistic. But the abruptness of the Travelocity announcement was unnerving. "A few weeks ago, I was watching a TV program showing how customer-service people in India were being trained to speak with a Southern accent," Stanley said. "I didn't realize I was seeing our annihilation."
Travelocity says it is only doing what its competitors have already
done. Sykes Enterprises, which runs centers for Fortune 500 clients,
is also cutting back sharply in the region.
It shut one center in
eastern Kentucky in January and has slated the second for extinction
next month. Those jobs are going overseas too.
At the heart of offshoring is the question of what a company owes
its workers and its community. It's a topic with particular
resonance in Appalachia, where the coal companies once owned
everything and the miners had to fight for basic human rights.
Fifteen years ago, the primary employer in Dickenson County was
Pittston Coal.
Like Travelocity, it was losing money. So Pittston
cut benefits for retired miners and their widows. The miners
responded by walking out. Hundreds were arrested for civil
disobedience. Violence flared as the strikers punctured tires on
coal trucks. The strike lasted nearly a year, the bitterness far
longer.
Two years ago, Pittston sold its holdings. Mining is still a big
business here, but ownership is fragmented.
Travelocity promised a much warmer relationship. Employees would
even get stock options.
"We plan to stay and be a part of the
community," one executive, Jim Marsicano, said at the official
announcement ceremony in May 2001. "Our employees are a family.
Every company says that, but we're a little different than most
companies."
Another executive, N. Russell Smith, told the local newspaper, the Dickenson Star: "We hope people will feel that, from top to bottom, they are just as important to this company as the highest executive."
Local development officials were so happy to land Travelocity that they loaned the company $250,000 for employee training. They also rounded up $1.6 million in government funding to build a day-care center. The goal: keeping the employees - and therefore Travelocity - happy.
A few years later, the company's promises are remembered with
weariness and the money with regret. Travelocity didn't turn out to
be so different after all. But the techniques used by workers
against the mining companies no longer apply.
"The situation with Pittston was physical," said Will Mullins, 22, a
Travelocity operations manager. "We could block the roads and block
the trucks, and there was no way they could get the coal out. But
there's no way to block the Internet. If we tried to do a strike,
they'd just ignore us."
Travelocity, like other companies, is doing what it takes to
survive, he added. "They'd cut our throats if it meant the stock
price would go up a quarter."
The company, a division of Sabre
Holdings in Southlake, Texas, was an early leader in the Web travel
business, but in the last two years its market share has been
falling against No. 1-ranked Expedia and the up-and-coming Orbitz.
Trying to remedy that situation, Travelocity has launched an
$80-million ad campaign featuring a gnome that roams the world.
Some workers at the call center don't understand how the company can afford the "roaming gnome" but not them. One created a computer screen-saver that parodies a popular MasterCard ad: "An hour of Indian labor: $1.50. Roaming gnome: $80 million. Costing 250 employees their jobs: PRICELESS."
Travelocity, which says it will save $100 million over several years by closing the call center, emphasizes that it's trying to be a responsible corporate citizen. The company gave the employees 10 months' notice.
It is encouraging them to apply for higher-paying sales jobs at its two remaining U.S. call centers, in Pennsylvania and Texas. It will subsidize medical insurance for three months after the center closes and refund some of those training grants it got from the state. The one thing it won't do is keep the center open. "We feel this is the right thing," said Michelle Peluso, who became Travelocity's chief executive in December.
Offshoring will play a significant role in making the company
solidly profitable for the first time, executives say. Travelocity
lost $55 million last year because of what Peluso called "our share
of missteps."
Much of the management team has changed, although
Travelocity's former chief executive, Sam Gilliland, was promoted.
He is now chief executive of Sabre.
In a financial document announcing the call center's closing, the
company said it had been trying to cut costs but "attrition levels"
were a big reason it wasn't successful.
"It was $4,000 in training every time we hired someone new," Peluso
said. "Many people made the economics tougher by choosing not to
stay with Travelocity."
Did Clintwood, then, fail Travelocity? The call-center workers
acknowledge that many new hires worked briefly and quit, unable to
endure the cranky customers and strict regimen. Suddenly, $8 an hour
didn't look that good.
Daniel Kincaid, a Travelocity employee, rejected that view. "Maybe
if Travelocity had invested a little more in people, if it had paid
them a little better, it would have slowed down the revolving door,"
he said.
If people in Dickenson County feel sad and disgruntled about
Travelocity, across the border in Kentucky they're downright angry
at Sykes Enterprises, which is transferring about 700 jobs overseas
with the closing of call centers in Hazard and Pikeville.
"A community like this is full of salt-of-the-earth, down-to-earth,
hard-working people," said Pikeville City Manager Donovan Blackburn.
"They're tickled to death with $6 an hour. This was a win-win
situation.
We put together a lucrative tax incentive package for
Sykes. And then when the package ended, they just ran."
The Sykes centers were announced by President Clinton (news - web
sites) during a 1999 visit to Hazard. The economy was booming and
jobs in the big cities were hard to fill.
It seemed to many that the
good times would go on forever. The poorest part of America was
finally about to participate.
Kentucky Gov. Paul E. Patton called it "a great day for the new Appalachia." Clinton hailed Sykes for making "a major commitment," as chief executive John Sykes stood by.
"Sykes and Patton went arm in arm," recalled Hazard Mayor Bill
Gorman. "I figure Sykes might have picked the governor's pocket."
In both Hazard and Pikeville, Sykes received at least $3 million
under a state program that taxed the mining of coal to provide funds
for development.
Sykes' facility in Hazard was built in Coalfields
Regional Industrial Park, nearly all of which is still vacant.
Hazard, though, is more vibrant than Clintwood.
Globalization may
have taken away the call center, but it's brought many Indian
doctors to Hazard's regional healthcare center.
During a brief tour of the town, Gorman pointed out the new 120-bed veterans center, the expanding Appalachian Regional Healthcare complex, the spot where a Lowe's home improvement store will be built and the nearly finished Wal-Mart that is double the size of the old Wal-Mart.
The loss of the Sykes jobs can be borne. But Gorman and other Hazard leaders feel betrayed anyway. "You come into a small town and raise hopes, I think you have some commitment," said Charles Housley, a development executive with Appalachian Regional Healthcare. "Corporate integrity is another thing that's leaving this country."
An assistant in John Sykes' office in the company's headquarters in
Tampa, Fla., said the chief executive was on a round-the-world tour
and there was no way to reach him.
Subhaash Kumar, senior director of investor relations, said Sykes
was closing its U.S. call centers and opening new ones in such
places as the Philippines, Costa Rica and India for one reason: Its
clients, which include the consumer Internet operations of Microsoft
Corp. and SBC Communications Inc., were insisting on reducing their
costs.
"This is client-driven," Kumar said. "Our clients tell us where they
want the centers to be, and we do it."
Even if Rep. Rick Boucher (defeated in 2008) (D-Va.)
succeeds in his efforts to find a replacement for Travelocity,
Dickenson County has gotten the message: Concentrate on the things
that can't be taken away, the things that are homegrown and small
scale.
This fall, a museum is opening in a former funeral home that
will celebrate the area's most famous son, bluegrass musician Ralph
Stanley. (Note this failed and defaulted on their loans.) And there are plans to exploit the region's harsh natural
beauty for tourism.
Still, there's no way around it. Barring good news, Travelocity's
departure will be a major blow. "Economists are saying all this offshoring will be good for the
economy in the long term," said Clintwood Mayor Donald Baker. "I
guess the question is, what do these people do in the short term?"
In the short term, Travelocity agent Charlie Dotson knows what he'll
probably have to do - the job that killed his uncle in an accident
and that gave both his grandfathers black lung disease. It's
something he has tried to avoid, but now he's 30, with two children
and too few options.
"I'll go work in the mines," Dotson said. "It's the only job here where you can make a decent living."
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