O’Toole issues call centre warning

IRELAND should not depend on low added value enterprises such as call centres, the president of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) warned yesterday.

Senator Joe O’Toole said call centres would be located in India or English-speaking Africa within 10 years.

“There is no future in call centres for the next Ireland. Our future is in research and development, new products and new markets,” Sen O’Toole told the Institute of Personnel and Development members at the O’Malley and Associates CIPD breakfast business briefing in Cork yesterday.

“That is what will make us competitive. The only future is added value and that is not putting computers in packages. What we need to be doing is adding intellectual value. That is how competitiveness is achieved.”

Senator O’Toole lashed the Small Firms Association (SFA) for their recent rant about wages and competitiveness: “Every month they issue a new whinge about their latest set of problems. They blame the Government. They blame the unions, but they never take control of their own destiny. They are much more comfortable rehearsing problems then presenting solutions.

“Their current problem is wage expectations undermining competitiveness, but Irish wage demands are no more about inflation than Europe. The real problem is not about expectation but inflation,” he said.

“And who creates inflation? Well it’s the same people who price and sell the products which contribute most to rising inflation, food, drink, milk, meat, houses... the same people who incidentally are the SFA.”

Sen O’Toole said farmers were the great victims of this at the moment. He said they were being hammered by price fixing cartels at the farm gate and then being fleeced as consumers at the retail counters.

“Breaking competition law through price fixing, etc, is now a criminal offence, but the Competition Authority are being starved of resources. The authority has no more that three detectives for the whole country”.