There's no British left in "BT"

Posted: 2nd March 2003

The haemorrhage of British jobs in the once highly prized service sector continues with the announcement last month that BT, formerly "British Telecom" was to shift 700 customer service jobs from its UK call centres to the hi-tech city of Bangalore in India.

But BT bosses are not just red-nosed but red faced after a week which has witnessed severe problems with the newly transferred customer and technical support services of BT Internet and BT Openworld.

A high profile report submitted to BT bosses on Friday revealed that "thousands" of complaints have been made in a few days about BT Internet's customer service department. This embarrassing report found its way into the hands of a BT employee sympathetic to the BNP. The report details the breakdown of complaint by telephone exchange number, the date and nature of complaint and BT's promised course of action in dealing with each complaint, if any.

The nature of the complaints vary from the time taken for call centre employees to pick up the call, the problem communicating with the call centre staff in Bangalore, who while are very polite and friendly have clearly not been given enough training in idiomatic English. Complaints about the length of the call to the technical services department which are charged at an astonishing 50p per minute have also been made along with complaints that email responses which are guaranteed within 48hrs have not materialised.

This service is one of the first BT switched to India in a bid to use the cheapest labour possible. Savings of up to 50% have been forecast by sacking British workers at call centres around the UK. Annual salaries in India start at £2,500 which seems like poor pay by UK standards but such wages are highly desirable in a country where poverty, squalor and famine are rife.

In addition to BT customers blowing their fuse directly to BT, hundreds of irate and anxious BT Internet subscribers jammed the BBC switchboards during a radio phone-in on the Jeremy Vine Radio 2 show on Friday.

One BNP member who works for BT described the first week of BT's Bangalore contract as "unbelievable chaos, the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing".

Meanwhile the Union of Communication Workers, which claims to represent BT workers, is in a quandary. It feels it is obliged to act on behalf of the British workers who have been paying union dues yet the union has been apparently cautioned that to do so would open itself up to charges of "racism" and that, according to New Labour's disciples is far worse than defending British jobs for British workers. In addition one union Amicus plans an investigation into condition of workers......in INDIA! Yes, rather than investigate realistic alternatives for keeping jobs in the UK, the good folk at Amicus are commissioning an academic enquiry into work conditions in India.

BT joins a long list of job exporters, keen to cut costs and dump British workers . A rogue's gallery of these "blue chips" would be made up of the following:

AXA, Aviva, BUPA, British Airways, Britannia,Churchill Insurance, Eagle Star, Fidelity, GE Capital, Great Universal, HSBC, Prudential, Royal and Sun Alliance.

There are more, many more job losses in the pipeline. Whether Amicus or the UCW will pluck up some backbone to stop this unacceptable export of British jobs remains to be seen.