Deaf Anthology 122: "Outsourcing"

A major relay service provider have decided last night at its Board meeting to outsource all interpreters jobs to overseas in India, effective in January. According to informed sources on the conditions of not being identified, will make an announcement of their intentions sometimes next week, after first having an in-service discussion with its field employees. All relay centers in the United States and Canada will closed, hundreds of interpreters will be laid off. The headquarter and its consumer services will be based in Indianapolis. Transfer opportunities will be available. Several interpreters have already received the pink slips, and are devastated, and will filed a complaint with labor relations citing that they were not given reasonable advanced notices. The new relay service centers will be in temporary offices rented in both Mumbai and Delhi, India until a permanent location that meets its specifications are found. A well-known Deaf Indian snake charmer have been hired to be director of operations, his task was to hire several technical support personnel to meet the deadline. Dr. Bengal, who attended Gallaudet, and received his PhD from the University of Calcutta recalled from childhood seeing a videophone on the Jetsons and knew from then on that is a technology that the Deaf will someday embraced, "I am glad to be of service to our American Deaf relay consumers, and with access to satellites spanning the globe, we can reach out to the Deaf on all four corners of the earth. A team of Deaf employees are now on its way to India to hire and train interpreters from local universities where they have been teaching ASL for the last several semesters. A few Pakistanis have also been hired to assist with the transition. The reasoning is that interpreters in the United States are expensive to hire because we must provide them with health insurance, sick leave, and other benefits in order to retain them. The labor pool in India are plentiful and cheap, allowing us to increase our profit margin. We aren't in this business for nothing but to meet our shareholders expectation of a return on their investments. I don't see a problem with that as our videophones are imported from China and there won't be any deterioration in service that our Deaf consumer feared. The Deaf often complained that we take away interpreters from them as they were having problems scheduling ones for their medical appointments, job interviews, classrooms, etc. This will be resolved once our former interpreters exhausted their unemployment benefits. In Janruary, you will notice the changes, it will take a while for our Deaf consumers getting used to having Indian interpreters. We are also presently looking at locations throughout Pakistan if we decided to expanded our operations.
Revised 11/19/08


This is Smokey, stay tuned for the next episode of Deaf Anthology. Good night, Deaf America!