Roman Romulo, deputy majority leader of the Philippine House of Representatives, bragged to the Manila Standard Today earlier this month that the Philippines “has secured its place as the world’s fastest-growing outsourcing hub.” Romulo pointed out that BofA is the last of the “big four” US banks to move their business-support network to his island nation, where the average family makes $4,700 a year.
source: 3 Years After Taxpayer Bailout, Bank of America Ships Jobs Overseas | Mother Jones.
An important part of this whole deal is that the Philippines doesn’t have all these crazy “regulations” as in there are no data privacy laws for call centers:
US banks already are operating call centers in the Philippines, “despite the fact that they haven’t actually passed this rudimentary legislation,” says Shane Larson, legislative director for the Communication Workers of America (CWA), which represents 150,000 American call center workers. The Indian government is ahead of the Philippines in passing data privacy laws, notes the union, but those laws specifically exempt the call center industry. And that could lead to problems: In a 2005 survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers, 85 percent of the Indian outsourcing companies that responded said they had experienced information security breaches in the previous year.
So for those of you who worked for Bank of America: kick rocks. For those of you who bank with Bank Of America: make sure you regularly check that no one in the Philippines is trying to open a credit card in your name.
I didn’t really think of this before. Last time I went through a job search, the call center was overseas. So basically I was giving over a bunch of information to someone who has no penalty for accessing my private info.