OPINION
Your Tax Dollars at Work: Sending Jobs Overseas

You can try hurting them in the wallet, though it rarely succeeds. Hershey CEO Rick Lenny gutted that company, closing the Oakdale, Calif., plant, among others, while sending jobs south of the border, where labor is cheaper. Then he "retired," wealthy beyond anything you or I could possibly imagine.

It's a different situation in Riverbank, Calif. That's where GoAmerica operates the California Relay Service call center, and where about 500 of the 700 employees can expect to lose their jobs to workers in the Philippines.

Unauthorized Calls Blocked

The employees there provide telephone and Internet assistance to the deaf and disabled, and do some Spanish-language translations.

Any Californian who has a phone is subsidizing these services through state surcharges and federal taxes listed on the monthly bill. You can't boycott the product as you can when a private company outsources. You have no choice but to pony up -- not that the surcharges will break you. Mine totaled two US cents to the state and 48 cents to the feds last month.

GoAmerica claims it is lopping staff because it is now blocking international calls, thus lowering the center's call volume and its need for the employees. Many of the international calls, employees said, come from scammers based in places like Nigeria. They target individuals and businesses in the United States.

Apparently, after decades of warnings, people still are falling for these scams. Regardless, the service is supposed to handle only domestic calls. It's not supposed to pay Ernestine the Operator to be the intermediary for a bunch of criminals who want to "borrow" your bank account so they can thaw some of their assets supposedly "frozen" in U.S. accounts and drain your balance in the process.

Your Tax Dollars Hard at Work

About 150 to 200 of the operators will remain in Riverbank to provide relay services to deaf and disabled callers under the California Relay Service contract. That private operator contract is negotiated with the state's Public Utilities Commission.

The rest will lose their $10-an-hour (and up) jobs, with benefits.

The Federal Communications Commission contracts for the Internet-based Internet Protocol system often exploited by scammers, pornographers and creatures of that ilk.

Losing the jobs is bad enough. But taxpayers are the ones funding this export.

GoAmerica, headquartered in New Jersey, outsources the Riverbank operation to a Canadian company called "Stella Nordia." In turn, Stella Nordia is adding jobs in the Philippines.

Where's Lou Dobbs?

So there you have it, folks: Your tax dollars are hard at work enabling an American company to outsource the jobs to a Canadian company that, at some point, likely will outsource them to the Philippines, if it hasn't already.

GoAmerica spokesperson Thomas Rozycki acknowledged that "as for the Philippines, there is the possibility that traffic will shift to that center, but we have not made any formal announcement as of yet."

Contracting with international call centers on the Internet side is routine, he said: "The standard practice in IP for companies is to use both domestic and international call centers."

The companies are reimbursed by the government for the costs of handling the calls, and the government gets the money for this through you and your phone bill. According to dslreports.com, a watchdog Web site for broadband, the companies are paid about $1.50 per minute to handle the calls.

Money in Their Pockets

A worker in Riverbank suggests the company will continue to reap profits by shipping the jobs to the Philippines.

"American taxpayers are now paying the income of workers in the Philippines to continue the processing of calls for scammers," the employee wrote in an e-mail . "GoAmerica is not going to give up all of the income that was coming in from those call minutes. Now they're making even more money off of them because of how little they have to pay overseas workers."

Does the FCC know this? Certainly. It negotiated the contracts with the IP providers. The agency claims it doesn't have the authority to demand the jobs remain in the United States even though we're paying for them.

Yes, we're underwriting the companies that are outsourcing American jobs.

I suspect far more than the 500 soon-to-be-jobless people at the Riverbank call center have a hangup about that.