“While some people are sleeping in the U.S.,” Webb said, “people can be coding in India and vice versa.”
Rebadging U.S. workers
Genpact, the outsourcing company created and spun off by General Electric, doubled its U.S. employment last year, to 2,000 of its 40,000 global employees. Most of that expansion came with Genpact’s contract with drugstore giant Walgreens to take over its accounting services. It bought Walgreens’ accounting center in Danville, Ill., promising to hire there.
Taking over existing employees of another company is called “re-badging.” Indian firms have been uncomfortable managing U.S. workers in the past, Hira said, particularly when Indian workers are working alongside Americans who are paid more. But companies increasingly see rebadging as a necessary way to expand.
Genpact is also hiring at centers in California and Pennsylvania as it aims to expand in the mortgage and regulatory compliance industries and in consumer product, hospital and health-care companies.
“The U.S. became the fastest-growing location for us,” last year, said chief executive V.N. “Tiger” Tyagarajan. “We expect that to continue on this year.”
Bob Kane, treasurer of New York-based textilemaker Westpoint Home, which makes Ralph Lauren linens, uses Genpact for general accounting in India and accounts payable in Mexico. He’s used Genpact’s Pennsylvania office for its accounts receivables work since 2007.
The Pennsylvania office “is the most competent and is the most business-savvy,” he said, noting that it does the work 40 percent more efficiently for less money and with fewer people than his company could do in-house.
“They understand it is important to get the job done and stay the extra hour,” he said. “They get it. They get what we need. We don’t always get the same feeling from” outsourcing contracts abroad.
He pays slightly higher wage rates — $15 an hour — to keep the receivables work in the United States. He said he’s heard from executives at other companies that the quality of work in India is slipping as turnover increases and Indian companies invest less in training, especially if a client isn’t willing to pay higher wages over time. Some U.S. companies don’t want sensitive customer data transmitted abroad. Others are tired of poor service, accents and crackling phone lines.
Managing across cultures
The lower Manhattan branch of Aegis, on Broad Street, is one of the company’s top performers. And Capuana, 41, is hiring. The 11th-floor lobby is crowded with applicants looking for training and jobs, some of them unemployed and on public assistance.
At $12 to $14 an hour with possible monthly bonuses, workers can make four times what call center workers in India do. But Essar executives say it’s worth paying more in wages to leverage a large U.S. presence to gain contracts with banks, health-care companies and governments that require the work to be done here.
Some workers at the call center, such as Mary Auguste-George, eventually move up the ranks. Originally from St. Lucia, she started as a phone rep, moved to supervisor, then trainer and and is now payroll manager of the lower Manhattan division. Capuana calls her “a diamond in the rough who just hits the ground running.”
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