Romney Campaign Relying on Filipino Call Centers?

Washington, DC – The latest online rumor citing Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign for calling U.S. voters from Filipino call centers has been denied by the Romney campaign.  However, as the Communications Workers of America (CWA) notes today, we know that two other revelations this year about Romney and Republicans’ off-shoring call center work overseas are true and disturbing.

As McKay Coppins of BuzzFeed writes of the new rumor, “The Romney campaign flatly rejected a widely-spread online rumor Sunday night that it had outsourced some of its call centers.  The rumor, which has been percolating on Twitter in recent days, appears to be fueled by anecdotal accounts from people who say they've received cold calls from Romney campaign canvassers located in the Philippines.”

However, two earlier revelations involving both Romney and the RNC and off-shoring call centers are true and undisputed.  First, in May, to conduct a media conference call dedicated to attacking President Obama’s economic record, the Republican National Committee (RNC) used a call center based in the Philippines, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

Second and even more damaging, an investigative report in the Washington Post from June highlighted the fact that Romney helped to usher in the detrimental practice of shipping call center jobs overseas.  At a time when the U.S. call center industry is shedding jobs and American consumers face heightened risks of fraud emanating from overseas call centers, the revelations are troubling. 

As Tom Hamburger’s investigative piece in the Post noted, “During the nearly 15 years that Romney was actively involved in running Bain, a private equity firm that he founded, it owned companies that were pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United States to overseas call centers and factories making computer components, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission…Bain played several roles in helping these outsourcing companies, such as investing venture capital so they could grow and providing management and strategic business advice as they navigated this rapidly developing field.”

Earlier this year, House Republicans’ voted against advancing a call center bill that would have accelerated efforts to bring some of these off-shored call center jobs back home to American communities.  The legislation would have helped to revitalize a U.S. call center industry that has lost over 500,000 jobs just in the past six years, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics and largely due to “pioneers” like Romney. 

According to George Kohl, Senior Director at CWA, “Mitt Romney’s role in ushering in the current, ‘profits over people’ era in the American call center and customer service industry has had real and lasting consequences for the communities and families strengthened by a vital American industry.  Regardless of the veracity of the latest rumor on the subject, Romney has stood on the wrong side of American families on this issue.”

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Contact: Chuck Porcari or Elizabeth Schilling at 202-434-1168 cporcari@cwa-union.org or eschilling@cwa-union.org