BlogWood: MT Archives

Welfare daddy takes the money and runs

Well, it looks like our little $4 million welfare experiment, our pansy-ass coddling of “needy” people companies is turning into a huge failure. We give these shiftless irresponsible louts our tax dollars, we pay these unrefined yahoos to make babies jobs, which they happily do as long as the free money is coming in, and they just sit around all day sucking from the welfare teat and getting fat off the public dole as we hard working tax payers put in extra hours to support their dysfunctional lifestyle shareholders.

We do all this hoping to give them a leg up, a little push down the road to success, but all we end up doing is making them weak and lazy. And then, when these wily welfare daddies sense a better deal elsewhere, they up and leave us in the lurch. They abandon their children employees, shirking all responsibility, leaving the state to provide for their former charges, and shack up with the first sugar daddy they can find.

Capital One is shutting down its sprawling credit card call center in Tampa, eliminating 1,100 jobs and delivering a serious blow to a decadelong effort to upgrade the area's economic base.

The Tampa job cuts, which were announced along with smaller staff reductions in Dallas and Richmond, Va., are part of Capital One's ongoing push to outsource much of its customer relations work.

Salaries at the Tampa center range from $35,000, with bonuses, to $100,000 for some managers, employees said. They said they were told their jobs would be sent overseas, but the company would not say where the work will be done. About 350 jobs will remain in Tampa.
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The McClean, Va., company plans to sell its five-building complex in Tampa. The 71-acre site includes a jogging trail, gym, laundry service and cybercafe. It intends to lease back an undetermined amount of space to house the 350 workers who will remain to handle auto finance collections.

In a statement, Capital One said most of the jobs will be outsourced to "U.S.-based companies." Spokeswoman Tatiana Stead would not directly address whether those U.S. companies, in turn, would send the work offshore, a practice that has emerged as a major political issue.
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"They told us that our work is being outsourced to another country, and that is the main thing everybody is upset about," said Patricia Correa, 59, who worked as an account supervisor.

"Everybody in Tampa helped build that company. ... It was a financial decision, they told us, because they can pay people in India way less."

Several employees said Capital One established a precedent of using foreign workers within the past year when jobs in the Spanish-speaking department in Tampa were shipped to Costa Rica.

"It's unfortunate that they feel like outsourcing is the answer," said Daniela Demorais, 23, a Capital One account supervisor who lives in St. Petersburg. "I don't think they'll get the quality ... that they want."

One of the largest providers of Visa and MasterCard credit cards in the world, Capital One swept into Tampa in 1995, starting with about 150 employees. It rapidly added buildings and employees to its Town 'N Country campus near Waters Avenue and the Veterans Expressway.

Prospective employees were courted through advertising on billboards and the Yellow Pages.

Capitol One had been courted, too, at taxpayer expense. In 1996, the company was approved for a $4-million tax refund - about $1-million to come from local governments - to be paid out over time through the Qualified Target Industry Program. QTI, as it is sometimes called, is a state incentive plan that uses public money to attract companies with high-paying jobs. Capitol One had to agree to bring 1,000 jobs.
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Hillsborough County Commissioner Jan Platt, who consistently votes against incentive programs for industry, said Wednesday's announcement is the reason why.

"There's no guarantee that the companies will stay," Platt said. "Do the taxpayers get refunded? I seriously doubt it."
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...Capital One beat analysts' earnings expectations for the second quarter. The company said it earned $1.65 per share, up from $1.23 the prior year and above forecasts of $1.50 per share.