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Ten years ago, the Department of Labor wrapped up a lengthy investigation of Arise Virtual Solutions, a company that recruited customer service agents to work from home fielding calls for big brand names like Disney and AAA. The so-called gig economy was in its infancy, with Uber launching and TaskRabbit starting to go national.
The question for the Obama administration’s Labor Department: Did Arise employ those customer service agents? Arise trained the agents and exercised extraordinary control over their work. But it treated them as independent contractors rather than employees. That meant the agents weren’t entitled to minimum wage, overtime or other employment protections. They paid for their own training and equipment, and even had fees deducted from each paycheck for use of Arise’s technology platform.
large part is complaints from customers. callers say it s harder and takes longer to resolve customer service issues when they are talking to someone who doesn t speak the same dialect or share the same culture. so an atlanta-based company called arise virtual solutions is trying to meet the demand by hiring americans for customer service jobs that often had been out sourced to developing countries, listen. in the last ten years over a million jobs have been sent to india or the philippines in the customer service call center space alone. what companies discovered that while that was great from a cross perspective what they were losing was the connection with the customer. reporter: the internet has helped make this domestic business model work instead of manning a traditional phone bank these customer service agents mostly work from home as independent contractors and set their own hours. many say that flexibility compensates for the relatively