On today’s Dylan Ratigan Show, the guest was an executive from a company called Arise (technically it is called Arise Virtual Solutions but I gag on the buzz-wordiness of that phrase). It’s a company that runs call centers from home. My scam-o-meter pings a bit, but President Obama mentioned her and the company in a speech about jobs as a particularly good example of a company bringing jobs back to the US that have been off-shored.
Any Doper have any experience with Arise? Good experiences or bad, please share them.
I haven’t, but here’s a long thread from the WAHM forums. On a cursory read of the first page, it looks like the big hangup is being required to incorporate (at least this was a requirement in 2008), and you also must pay to apply. The latter is fairly standard in work-at-home contractor jobs of this kind, but I haven’t heard of the former. It’s probably a way of trying to avoid people suing for benefits as employees rather than contractors. On the flip side, they seem to pay more than average for this type of work.
To me (as former call center management), it seems a pretty clever way of running a call center – why pay all the costs for a huge center? Why have to limit your employee pool to a certain area, when hiring and staffing are always huge call center problems? But, working as an independent contractor always has negatives for the workers – lack of health care, for example. Plus, I’ve heard plenty of horror stories of home call center work, where they require you to login for certain hours, but only actually pay you for time on calls – meaning they control when you work, and how much you work depends on how they staff, leading people to be earning just a couple bucks an hour. That said, that’s general feedback about the industry, not this country in particular.