Washington Post Guild Unit -- May 4, 2004 Bulletin

May 4, 2004

Outsourcing Hits Home: Post to Move Guild Work to Wisconsin for Cheap Labor
Implementation June 14—No Long-Term Guarantees for Current Call Center Staff

The Post will move a substantial portion of its circulation call center work to Wisconsin effective June 14, employees were told on April 27. The call center, which employees about 40 people, handles a range of customer services including subscriber assistance with delivery problems and cancellations. The call center has been a central part of The Post’s local customer service system for decades. Although The Post has promised that the change won’t result in immediate layoffs, it will result in radical changes to most call center employees’ hours; most will be offered lower volume hours of 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. shifts, at least for now. Peak customer calls—from 6:30 a.m. to about 9:00 a.m. —will be routed a thousand miles west to La Crosse, Wisconsin.

The Post’s 40 or so call center employees work one of the lowest paying jobs at the paper, and many are part-timers. The shifting of their work out of state is likely to cause a reduction in hours in the future—causing a reduction in benefits (and income, of course), and a rise in employee health care premiums. The Post’s call center is nearly 95% minority and 90% women (in contrast, La Crosse, Wisconsin is nearly 92% white and 8% minority).

“We are a newspaper, not a call center” the Post’s Labor VP said to Guild representatives on April 27. Guild leaders and others expressed alarm at that attitude. After all, does that mean The Post is also not a delivery company, a printing operation, an advertising center? What part of the Washington Post is next to be amputated as an expensive add-on, better done by lower paid, non-union folks who have no connection at all to the hometown The Post claims to serve?

The Post is offering tiny sweeteners to the workers while throwing their lives into upheaval. The Post announced that it would raise call center staffs’ wages one grade, and train employees on data entry and billing. The increases won’t address problems in rearranging family obligations, second jobs (a necessity for the many employees who have been limited by the Post to only part time schedules), childcare or the problem of finding parking at 2:00 in downtown DC or outlying Metro parking lots. The Guild has demanded to bargain over the impact of the outsourcing action. The Post refused to provide meeting space so that affected employees could meet with the Guild to discuss this important issue.

The sweetener followed by two weeks the Publisher’s receipt of hundreds of Post employee signatures to a petition against contracting out Post jobs.

The Guild circulated the petition in response to the Post’s “trial” contracting out of circulation call center work to the La Crosse, Wisconsin call center. A Chicago-based firm, APAC Customer Services Incorporated, operates the call center, which hires Wisconsin workers at low wages and with few benefits to handle subscriber customer service calls for Post subscribers. Post circulation numbers in La Crosse are said to be low, and it is suspected that few La Crosse residents spend their money here in DC.

On April 16, the Guild met with the Publisher to discuss the fallout from outsourcing. Contracting out of Post work that supports decent paying local jobs with benefits erodes the economic well being of Post employees, and residents of the community --this community--in which we live and the Post does business.

Before contracting with APAC, the Post would have filled the position of a departing call center employee by hiring a local person. That would keep decent jobs here in the DC area—jobs that supported families, provided access to health care, and retirement sav-ings. Money earned here in DC is spent here, taxes are paid here, supporting the creation of still more
jobs here in our community. Instead, as call center employees depart—whether now because they can-not accommodate the drastic schedule change—or later as employees leave the company for other reasons— it’s likely that no one will be hired to do the work in DC.

But the work will be done. No, The Post is not a call center, but without customer service, and other vital commercial-side work, it can’t support the news portion of its business, period.

Following the April 16 meeting, the Publisher promised to seriously consider the Guild’s concerns. But it didn’t take long for The Post to make its decision--a decision that contradicts one of Chairman/CEO Don Graham’s stated commitments: that of providing “strong support to the communities where we do business and a good place to work.”

The Guild has also learned that in May The Post will outsource another segment of DC-based jobs in the Advertising department to another cheap labor company (WillowCSN Incorporated) in Mirimar, Florida. Outsourcing of local jobs is a cancer in our community, and it is growing.

This cancer must be stopped before it spreads further. No department is immune when The Post starts down the road of abandoning its commitment to good jobs in the community in which it does business.

The Guild calls on The Post to demonstrate that it really is a good place to work for all employees, including those who perform the not-so-public not-so-glitzy work of holding onto subscribers and bringing in ad revenue. We seek:

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