British Gas plans to outsource 1,000 jobs to Indian subcontinent |
|
|
|
Published
:
Sat, 16 Jul 2005 12:05
|
LONDON, July 16: The latest company to fall for the very tempting apple of out-sourcing jobs to the Indian subcontinent is British Gas, which announced that it intended to effect almost 2,000 redundancies, half of which would be out-sourced to Indian call-centers.
A company spokesman said that the proposal was still at a very preliminary stage and extensive discussions would be carried out before arriving at any concrete decision, "With new billing systems, we will not need anything like the number of back office data processors," the spokesman added.
For the Centrica-owned British Gas, this is the first move towards out-sourcing any jobs, however, the company stressed that any jobs, which require face-to-face customer handling, would not be outsourced. "We have no plans to offshore our customer service call handling. British gas is wholly committed to maintaining its existing call centres in the UK. Over the last year, we have recruited more than 2,500 frontline staff and continue to hire customer service advisers, field sales agents and service engineers," said Mark Clare, the managing director of British Gas.
The company said that improvements in technology have made the job of processing bills, meter readings and other information very easy and that these jobs no longer needed extensive employee attention. Hence, the decision to offshore these jobs. The job cuts would be affecting Manchester, Oldham and Solihull offices.
British Gas currently employs 26,000 workers across the UK. The company said that the job cuts would probably effected later this year, though it was still in talks with the unions.
As expected this decision has triggered off a fury among the various unions, the public service union Unison, has called these job cuts as "completely unacceptable" and has warned of union action against the same. "No one should be fooled that these savings will go towards reducing customer's bills or improving services," Steve Bloomfield, Unison's head of utilities said.
GMB union's national officer, Brian Strutton also warned of strike action, "British Gas makes big profits from British customers and they should support British jobs or the British people will not support them," he declared.
Meanwhile, British Gas owner Centrica is looking to find new fields in the North Sea after it received a go-ahead to conduct drilling operations in that area.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Print this Story
