Giant outsourcer keeps work from home, loses tax breaks. Government says 'good riddance'

The government of the Philippines has welcomed the decision by giant business process outsourcer Concentrix Corporation to forgo tax incentives and instead allow its staff to continue working from home for the foreseeable future. The nation feels that subsidising outsourcers' bottom lines does nothing to boost the local economy …

[Ali Dodd]

Shocked

What the government is doing removing the subsidy is right.

What the company is doing is more shocking and seems eminently sensible - should happen over here. Put hubs in residential areas to support home working, I think there should be a lot more desk sharing facilities out of the centre of towns, lets stop traveling so far and support communities and be distributed much more. Big old landowners will hate it but the nature of work evolves - a decentralised workforce reduces a whole host of pressures and costs AND is better for the environment.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Shocked

This, but we also need legislation that prevents pay discrimination based on whether someone works from home or not. I can see that coming in the near future at pay reviews.

"Oh, well, you see you work from home we're only giving rises to people that come to the office because they have the greater expenses...etc etc etc".

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Shocked

My company does it the other way around, pay incentives if you don't want a desk in the city maintained for you.

Which makes sense.

Not sure we need legislation on this. Coming to the office may be more or less efficient and more or less eco depending on circumstances, legislation would be complicated to get right and quite possibly introduce an incorrect bias where there isn't one.

Work from home seems to make sense for everyone in a lot of cases.

[TeeCee]

Re: Shocked

...legislation would be complicated to get right and quite possibly introduce an incorrect bias where there isn't one.

So, in other words, a bureaucrat's wet dream and thus pretty much guaranteed to happen then?

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Shocked

I came to make the same point. Hereabouts we still have a few old mill buildings that haven't become "brownfield" housing sites. They could and should be used in this way. They're in the midst of the housing for their original workers. Given that such housing, in conservation terms one of the area's desirable features*, is ill-suited to providing charging point and public transport is useless**, restoring the old relationship between living and working should be a no-brainer once ICEs are phased out.

* This is a rural area and most of the housing is traditional stone-built but with at most a small area and a footway between it and the road.

** With the demise of the mills the area has become dormitory territory for a number of conurbations. The diversity of commuting destinations is far to great for public transport to provide single hop journeys. A long time ago I worked out my old commute 2 hours on a good day vs 40 minutes.

[H in The Hague]

Re: Shocked

"Put hubs in residential areas to support home working"

That sounds like the 'telecottages' of two or three decades ago. That concept was developed to allow remote working at a time when not that many people had an Internet connection at home.

History does repeat itself. Just like to a relative oldie like me, 'cloud computing' sounds suspiciously like 'timesharing', 'remote data processing', etc we used to have yonks ago :)

[The Indomitable Gall]

Re: Shocked

Well modern cloud computing is just network computing.

However, when it first came out, it was something different: it was network computing that the customer can't audit. Yes, literally.

I was working in a major B2B computer service company as it took off, and we had to keep explaining to our customers that the reason we didn't offer cloud services was that cloud computing left clients exposed because they couldn't do due diligence.

Meanwhile all the cloud gurus were crying "disruptive", and senior management at our clients were getting snippy about us not offering modern services.

Anyway, along came a couple of lawsuits dealing with questions of transparency and liability, and cloud operations switched to de facto data centre operations pretty much overnight, inviting clients in to view facilities, but they kept the "cloud computing" label.

And then all of us companies that ran traditional data centres just rebranded as "cloud"....

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Shocked

Meanwhile, up here in NE England, the huge DSS complex "out of town" but very well served by public transport, including the Metro light rail system that has a station right by the entrance and was only rebuilt and modernised about 20 years ago, is moving into a prestige new build in Newcastle city centre where there is already congestion, a soon to be effected congestion/clean air charge, crowded public transport and almost no car parking facilities. But the Gov are touting it as part of the "moving civil servants out of London" plan.

[hairydog]

Re: Shocked

I recall working at that site. Two minutes from the Metro station, but it was a 20 to 25 minute walk from the gate to my office.

I walked past loads of newly-built office blocks full of people all working alone at a screen, communicating by phone (their glacial email took far too long). They started at the crack of dawn to be able to secure a parking space.

Each time I wondered why on earth weren't they all working from home? 20-odd years later, I bet nothing has changed. It's simply a lack of confidence and imagination in the management chain.

[Pascal Monett]

This sets a dangerous precedent

This is absolutely unacceptable - for the shareholders.

This is going to set a very dangerous precedent. Who knows what the consequences might be ? We might even stop subsidizing entirely, and then where would our poor farmers be ? They might actually have to start selling their produce at cost+margin, and then the entire supermarket industry would have to, wait, raise their prices ?

Madness. This is the path of madness and the ultimate downfall of civilization. It needs to stop now.

[Version 1.0]

Re: This sets a dangerous precedent

" ...and then where would our poor farmers be... "

In the days before "Farmers" we were all just "Hunter Gatherers" ... these days a lot of them are just home workers writing malware to do their hunter gathering. Certainly this is all Madness these days but I see nothing suggesting that it's going to stop anytime soon.

[Gerry Hatrick]

Re: This sets a dangerous precedent

Yeah great, even more inflation. Whilst I agree that nobody should be getting subsidies will you be the one telling all those annoying poor people to "learn to code"?

[The Indomitable Gall]

Re: This sets a dangerous precedent

The last thing we want is a free market in food. Subsidies are in place because a true free market favours no excess production, leading to the possibility of catastrophic famine.

Look at how Russia's invasion of Ukraine has messed up food markets worldwide, and now imagine how utterly stuffed we'd all be (or not be, if we use a different definition of "stuffed"!) if the world's major markets didn't have subsidised overproduction.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: This sets a dangerous precedent

Or as we used to call it, Just In Time Manufacturing. Or how to go bankrupt for 1000 different reasons.

[John Brown (no body)]

tax perks are not that important to investors

"This goes to show that tax perks are not that important to investors doing business in the Philippines,"

Or, just maybe, the savings of having people work from home instead of from offices, even with government subsidies works out cheaper for them. There's still a cost to pay for those offices and call centres, even if subsidised. Not having them at all has to be cheaper.

[Henry Wertz 1]

Virtual Call Center

I worked at a cable co that used "virtual call centers", instead of having some huge bunch of people in some central location that may not even have the cable service, each cable headend had some techs to take care of installs, uninstalls, line repairs, etc., and in our case about 8 or so customer service reps on lines that could be called into. Calls to the 800 # would route to the nearest office, if there was more than about a minute or two hold time, the calls would forward to the next nearest office. LIke 99% of the time the calls I got were entirely for the local area. One time when there was a hurricane we were getting calls from Florida (about 1500 miles away) all day ("Is your power out?" "Yes." "For safety reasons, the power lines have to be strung back up first before the cable lines can be worked on, so it might be a while." I didn't ask how they knew if their cable was up or not considering the TV, cable box, and cable modem would not have any power.)

I could see the benefit of having smaller local offices for some things, and work from home for others, over having some large, prestigious office space that is like not really conveniently located for anybody.

[LybsterRoy]

I just had a thought - rare but it happens every now and again - all this homeworking is liable to increase a divide between factory floor (or anything that needs a physical presence) and office staff. Telefactoring is liable to arrive about the same time as the flying cars and fusion power.