PCCW Teleservices, a premier provider of global outsourcing solutions, has been awarded the “Best China Outsourcing Customer ontact Center of the Year (Inbound)” at the Annual China Best Customer Contact Center Awards 2011.

The Awards, organized by 51Callcenter in Tianjin recently, is recognized as the “Academy Awards” of the contact center industry. The Awards’ vision is to promote social awareness of excellent customer service, to improve contact center operation management, to establish service outsourcing industry standard, and to foster the development of outsourcing contact center industry in mainland China.

Members of the judging panel were impressed by PCCW Teleservices’ professional operations and management, and excellent service delivery, which enable its clients to improve customer satisfaction and increase revenue generation opportunities.

Mr. Joseph Wong, PCCW Teleservices Vice President, said, “We are delighted to be honored in the Annual China Best Customer Contact Center Awards. It is a tribute to our professional team who has made this possible, and we will provide even better services and solutions to our clients in the future.”

Source:http://www.irasia.com/listco/hk/pccw/press/p111027.htm

The Transport Workers Union (TWU) has called for the resumption of strikes and has claimed that Qantas management has reneged on promises not to outsource labour.

Tony Sheldon, national secretary of the TWU, said that executives for Australia’s national carrier told him during bargaining talks that new workers would not be hired in Australia under the airline’s current corporate scheme. Qantas officials have previously said that despite Asia-focused restructuring plans that Australian jobs would remain in Australia.

Sheldon told reporters that Qantas said ‘verbatim’ that it would begin outsourcing work whenever possible and that employees in Australia would be receiving lower pay rates. He said in response TWU members would take part in a stop work for one hour on Friday and accused the airline of lying to its own workforce and to the media. Such action had been previously called off in the effort of reaching an agreement, the union said.

The news follows nearly six months of negotiations between the airline and the TWU, which represents baggage handlers, caterers and other Qantas ground staff. The union has initiated a series of strikes over the period, which has resulted in weeks of flight disruptions and has affected hundreds of thousands of passengers.

Source:http://www.comparecarhire.co.uk/news/qantas-strikes-to-resume-following-outsourcing-talks-53834969.html

One out of every five Americans lives in a community that pays a for-profit company to install and operate cameras that record traffic violations. A pro-consumer group says that practice could end up putting profits ahead of safety and accuracy.

Some contracts require cities to share revenue with camera vendors on a per-ticket basis or through other formulas as a percentage of revenue. Suffolk County, N.Y., for example, diverts half of the revenue from its red-light camera program to its vendor, according to the report being released Thursday by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

Another type of agreement — conditional “cost-neutral” contracts — also contain provisions that link payments to the number of tickets issued, although the payments are capped, the report said. Under these contracts, local governments pay a monthly fee to a camera vendor. If ticket revenues fail to cover the vendor’s fee in any given month, cities may delay payments. That gives vendors “an incentive to ensure a minimum (number) of citations are issued,” the report said.

As many as 700 communities, with a combined total of more than 60 million people, outsource their street and highway camera systems, the report found.

While vendors capture violations, police or other local officials approve which violations are issued tickets. Some contracts penalize cities if they don’t approve enough tickets, effectively setting a ticket quota, the report said. That can undermine the authority of local authorities to when to issue tickets, it said.

“Automated traffic ticketing tends to be governed by contracts that focus more on profits than safety,” said Phineas Baxandall, the report’s co-author.

Baxandall acknowledged that cash-strapped communities have a financial incentive to maximize the number of citations they issue even when they don’t use a vendor. But local governments are also accountable to voters, whereas private vendors aren’t, he said.

Red-light cameras have been effective at saving lives by deterring motorists from running lights, said Anne Fleming, a spokeswoman for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

An analysis by the institute showed they saved 159 lives from 2004 to 2008 in the 14 biggest U.S. cities with cameras. If cameras had been operating during that period in all cities with populations of more than 200,000, 815 fewer people would have died, the institute estimated.

But Baxandall said research on the effectiveness of the cameras is unsettled. Some studies, he said, show motorists who are aware of the cameras sometimes cause injuries by slamming on their brakes to avoid being caught running a light.

Some red-light camera vendors have created and bankrolled organizations like the National Coalition for Safer Roads that appear to be grassroots civic groups, but which mainly promote greater use of red-light cameras, the report said.

David Kelly, president of the safer roads coalition, said the flaw in the research group’s study is that vendors don’t create traffic violations — motorists do.

Vendors “aren’t creating a market. The people running the red lights are creating the market,” he said.

“We have saved lives,” said Kelly, a former acting head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration under President George W. Bush. “Do we want to have more people dying at intersections because they are running red lights, or do we want to do something about it?”

The move to privatize red-light camera and speed camera enforcement is part of a larger wave of outsourcing of government services, Kelly said.

“We have private industry all across traffic safety,” he said.

The traffic enforcement industry has amassed significant political clout that it uses to shape traffic safety regulation nationwide, the report said. Camera vendors are aggressively lobbying to expand authorization for private traffic law enforcement to more states, and are marketing enforcement systems to more communities, it said.

About half of states have authorized the use of red-light cameras.

Camera vendors employed nearly 40 lobbyists this year in Florida whose agenda included killing a bill that would have required communities to adopt longer yellow light times to increase intersection safety and killing a separate bill that would have banned red-light camera systems, the report said.

Source:http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iFuG3L71QSn2EEPGdV7HN9fmC2Uw?docId=604a463b28de40729ae067911ee05fab