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North America’s Call Centre Capital
The province of New Brunswick, on Canada’s Atlantic Coast, has worked hard to become ‘the call centre capital of North America’, reports Ellen Balka, professor of Communication at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia. By offering a combination of generous incentives and state-of-the-art infrastructure, and promoting the assets of its labour force, the province has succeeded in attracting a large number of Fortune 500 companies, including United Parcel Service, Federal Express, Purolator Courier, IBM, Xerox, Hospitality Franchise Systems (HFS), Nortel, Marriott, Dun & Bradstreet, Royal Bank, and Camco, a (GE Subsidiary). Today, call centres provide about 9,000 jobs, or two per cent of the provincial work force.
Former Premier Frank McKenna, who played a major role in attracting call centres to the province in the early 1990’s, was early in identifying New Brunswick’s knowledge-based service sector as a critical part of his government’s new economic strategy. The strategy to attract call centres included investing in advanced telecommunications infrastructure and offering interest free loans and subsidies for sustainable jobs in high unemployment areas ranging from $5,000 to $10,000 per job. Other incentives include corporate taxes and workers’ compensation premiums that are amongst the lowest in Canada, and discounted rates for electrical power and telephone services.
The province has high rates of unemployment, a favourable exchange rate relative to the US dollar, and a highly educated, multi-cultural labour pool that includes a high proportion of bilingual (English/French) workers.
Professor Balka warns, however, that the industry is highly footloose, and that ‘the jobs which have been created may not necessarily be permanent or secure’. She points to a recent case when ICT Canada Marketing, a call centre which received a public subsidy to move to New Brunswick in 1995, abruptly declared itself out of business in 1999, after unionised workers spoke of a sweat-shop environment, with high turnover and heavy pressure to produce sales.
Ellen Balka will be speaking at the Where in the World? Conference.