Last week, the United States Call Center Worker and Consumer Protection Act was introduced in both the U.S. House and Senate. The bill has been strongly endorsed by CWA for protecting call center workers from seeing their jobs offshored and for protecting American consumers whose data could be at risk under the control of foreign companies and governments.

Under the proposed law, call center agents would be required to disclose their location, and customers would have the right to ask to be transferred to a call center located in the United States. The bill would penalize companies that outsource call centers overseas by withholding federal grants and contracts. It would further require that all call center work performed on federal contracts be done in the U.S., protecting the work from offshoring.

“As the union representing the largest number of workers in the call center industry, we understand how devastating call center offshoring is to U.S. workers, consumers, and communities,” said Dan Mauer, CWA Director of Government Affairs. “U.S. workers and communities rely on these good-paying jobs, and consumers rely on our data privacy laws to keep their personal identifiable information protected. We applaud the introduction of the bill and urge Congress to pass this legislation!”

The bill was introduced by Senators Bob Casey (D-Pa.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), and Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) in the Senate and Representatives Sharice Davids (D-Kan.) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) in the House.