What was that I just heard? Surely that can’t be true. Let me rewind the tape and hear that again, I said to myself. Sure enough what I heard was that if you have a Florida Food Stamp Debit card and you have a question about it when you call the phone number you reach a representative in India.
The account for this has been outsourced by the State of Florida to a large company which has outsourced it to India. With a country exploding with unemployment I am stunned that something so necessary to so many Floridians is being handled by people who are not even citizens of the Country let alone the state.
The reporter stated that more than twenty other states in the United States also have given contracts to this same company to handle these calls from India .
How can this be? I know many people who would love to answer those phones even for minimum wage but corporations in this country would prefer to pay citizens of other countries to do this work because they can take advantage of their poverty and pay them next to nothing. The fact that they barely speak or comprehend English nor do they understand what they are reading to a customer seems to not be of any importance to the corporation.
Let me tell you it matters to us citizens of this country who are trying to straighten out a food stamp problem or get tech support for our computers or the multitude of other outsourced services. I called for tech support for my anti-virus and asked the young man I could barely understand where he was and his answer was “I am in New Delhi. ” No wonder I could not break the accent barrier to get across what was wrong with my anti-virus and finally hung up in despair with no answer to my problem.
We should be ashamed that our government allows this exodus of badly needed jobs. Americans don’t make many products here anymore. "Buy American" used to be a big slogan here, but try to find something American made today. It’s nearly impossible.
The president wants to make jobs available and turn our economy around and I suggest he start by reversing this outsourcing practice. Let Americans do the work of our country and gain not only jobs but a pride in our country again. We seem to have lost that, too.