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To: Lane3 who wrote (33602)	3/9/2004 1:23:14 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793927

This is the headline in today's Tucson paper. Call centers have been a big employer in Tucson historically and they've lost a lot of those jobs lately. Nice to see some jobs staying home. Citigroup call center will bring 1,300 jobs Hiring process begins in April at UA tech park By David Wichner ARIZONA DAILY STAR Financial giant Citigroup will open a customer-service operation here that will be among Tucson's largest call centers, the company announced Monday. When it reaches full employment by the end of 2005, the new Citi Cards center on the far Southeast Side will employ up to 1,300 people in full- and part-time jobs - an 8 percent to 10 percent increase in a local industry that employs an estimated 13,000 to 16,000. The Citi Cards center will occupy a 116,000-square-foot building previously leased as a call center by Convergys Corp. at the University of Arizona Science and Technology Park, 9060 S. Rita Road. Citi Cards' Tucson employees will handle customer service, collections and fraud operations for its credit card business, the company said. Employees will handle both incoming and outbound calls. The company plans to start accepting applications by the end of April. In initial discussions with tech park officials, Citi Cards officials indicated full-time workers at the new call center would earn an average of $33,000 annually in wages and benefits, said Bruce Wright, UA associate vice president for economic development and CEO of the tech park. On Monday, a company spokeswoman would not discuss wage levels except to say that they will be competitive in the industry. Assuming that benefits account for about 25 percent to 30 percent a worker's salary - and considering that the $33,000 average includes management positions - those wages are about in line with the local industry average of around $9 an hour. Tucson and the UA tech park were just what Citigroup was looking for, both in terms of the building and the availability of a skilled work force, said Maria Mendler, a spokeswoman for New York-based Citigroup Inc. "Tucson and the tech park in particular really provided us with what we needed," Mendler said. "We need to have continuity of business and a good employee stream, and we found lots of positives in Tucson at that particular location." Citi Cards plans to upgrade the building to meet its needs and open the center sometime this summer, Mendler said. It will employ 300 to 400 workers by year's end and reach 1,300 full- and part-time employees by the end of 2005, she said. Citigroup, which ranks sixth on the 2003 Fortune 500 list of largest companies, will be the third Fortune 500 company at the UA tech park. The others are IBM Corp. and Raytheon Co. The new jobs are welcome at the park, where Convergys employed about 400 until it shut one of its two local call centers late last month, the UA's Wright said. The fact that another Fortune 500 company chose Tucson makes Citigroup's choice even more significant, Wright said. "From a public relations point of view, it's a very strong statement about Tucson," he said. The new Tucson center is part of a nationwide expansion of Citi Cards' customer service operations, which also includes expansion of existing sites, Mendler said. The company, which operates more than 30 call centers in North America, recently announced the addition of 650 positions at a Boise, Idaho, call center that currently employs 1,100, Mendler said. Other Western call center locations include Albuquerque; The Lakes, Nev.; and Salt Lake City, she said. Some of the company's call centers employ more than 2,000 workers. Mendler would not say what other communities were in the running for the new call center. Citi Cards' arrival signals an uptick in call center employment after a period of relative stagnation, a local teleservices industry official said. "That's a big one, and this should bode well for the community," said Paul Hawkins, chairman of the teleservices industry group of the Information Technology Association of Southern Arizona. Call center job losses to overseas outsourcing have been offset by the addition of new jobs and centers, including a 510-worker operation that insurer GEICO opened last year near East Speedway and North Kolb Road. In the past year, the parent companies of Convergys, Intuit and America Online have moved jobs to India, mostly to take advantage of lower labor costs. "We haven't lost a lot of jobs, but we do have that issue of sending jobs overseas," said Hawkins, who is call center manager for the Communications Services for the Deaf in Tucson. Citi Cards told park officials of its decision to locate here on Friday, after six to eight weeks of intense negotiations, Wright said. Landing Citi Cards was the culmination of a five-month, joint recruitment effort including officials of the tech park, the Arizona Department of Commerce, the Greater Tucson Economic Council, the city of Tucson Office of Economic Development and Pima County Development Services. Competitive lease pricing, the ready availability of the right kind of space, the ability to bring the call center online quickly and the availability of a strong skilled labor force helped the tech park seal the deal, park officials said. "This went way beyond selling simply bricks and mortar," said John Grabo, the tech park's director of marketing and international programs. "Fortune 10 companies don't take site selection lightly." A brief history l August 1994 - The University of Arizona buys the 2 million-square-foot IBM complex at South Rita Road and Interstate 10. September 1995 - State, county and city governments pledge $4 million in incentives to attract Microsoft's technical support center to 9060 S. Rita Road. February 1996 - Microsoft signs a 10-year lease. February 1997 - Microsoft announces it is pulling out of the building and subleasing it to call center operator Keane. February 2001 - Keane sells the 675-employee call center operation to Convergys, which runs one local call center. September 2003 - After moving hundreds of jobs out of Tucson, Convergys says it will pull out of 9060 S. Rita Road and keep open its other call center. March 2004 - Citi Cards announces its move to 9060 S. Rita Road ° Contact reporter David Wichner at 573-4181 or wichner@azstarnet.com.

To: Lane3 who wrote (33602)	3/9/2004 1:45:06 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793927

Sorry, I think we all get to evaluate that for ourselves Indeed. Or misevaluate it, as the case may be. Apropos of which: Repressing 9-11 By Lee Harris Published 03/08/2004 Last week, President Bush was attacked by members of the Democratic Party for using images of 9/11 in a campaign ad, and by the next day there was the normal political and media uproar over this burning question: Should the President be scolded for daring to use such images, or should he be defended? I do not wish to weigh in on this question because, like many burning questions being asked today, I think it is absurdly irrelevant, like the burning question whether President Bush should have worn a flight jacket while aboard a helicopter. Instead the question I want to ask is how our nation permits such "issues" to become burning questions in the first place. Do we have nothing more urgent to worry about? The answer to this question should be an easy one. Yes, we do have many more urgent things to worry about; and by far the most urgent is what to do about 9/11. Here I am not talking about what to do about future 9/11's -- catastrophic terror that may or may not happen in our near or our distant future -- I am referring back to the 9/11 that occurred on a beautiful morning over two and a half years ago. And our most urgent question today is: What should we as a nation do with our collective memory from that day? Increasingly the answer that is being given to this question by liberal Democrats is simple, Repress it. Push it out of our mind. Pretend that it never happened; or if you absolutely must refer to 9/11, pretend it was something along the lines of an earthquake or a freakish tidal wave -- a natural disaster without the slightest political implications. A tragedy, of course, but something we should all put behind us and move on. That is why the Democrats and the liberal media became apoplectic at the images of 9/11 that appeared in the Bush campaign ad. It was not Bush's use of the images that was so disturbing to them, but the images themselves. Democrats and liberals do not want to be reminded of 9/11; nor do they wish their country to be reminded of it either. Not because it is perceived as a campaign theme of the opposite party, but because 9/11, if rightly understood, requires a complete rethinking of their own warm and fuzzy vision of multilateral harmony in a conflict free world. The memory of 9/11 must be repressed because otherwise liberals would have to come to terms with the concept of The Enemy. They would have to face the grim and disturbing truth that there are people out there who relish the thought of pointlessly killing thousands of our fellow citizens, simply because they are our fellow citizens -- not for a political objective, or to achieve a military goal, but just because they see us as their enemy. A friend of mine recently said that he did not like the concept of the enemy and that, as far as he was concerned, all men were his brothers. But what if the man whom you wish to regard as your brother does not return your fraternal feelings of affection; what if he regards your offer as an insult to his honor? "You dare to call yourself my brother, you dog?" In which case, what do you do then? Do you respect his feelings, and accept him as your enemy? Or do you treat him as an inferior being and wave aside his protestations as if he were a four year old child -- "Now, now, Bobby, you don't really mean to say those bad things about mommy." To insist that your enemy is not your enemy when he insists on being one is to rob him of his humanity, and to endanger your own existence -- and all for the sake of preserving an unsustainable illusion. To recognize an enemy, and to treat him as one, is not to dehumanize him -- on the contrary, it is to treat him as your equal. It is to take him seriously. It is to meet him on his own terms. But that is just what liberal Democrats cannot bring themselves to do. They insist on pretending that 9/11 was just a kind of glitch, instead of seeing it as an act of devotion carried out by men who were motivated by the highest ethical purpose that they could comprehend. This is the terrible truth revealed by 9/11. It was not an act of crazed loonies, unlikely to reoccur; it was the symbolic gesture of an entire culture -- a culture that looked upon those who died in carrying out their mission as heroic martyrs who triumphed over a vastly more powerful enemy. That is why so much of the Arab world celebrated the great victory accordingly, by dancing in the streets and cheering the collapse of the Twin Towers -- another set of images that liberals are forced to repress, since to acknowledge such behavior is to acknowledge the concept of the enemy that is embodied in such wild rejoicing at the annihilation of men and women whom you had never met. It is almost as if we, as a nation, are entering into what psychologists call denial. Instead of making the necessary adjustments to reality in response to 9/11, we are engaged in a process of denying it, both by outright repression of all public memory of the event and by making it a subject of incomprehensibly stupid political controversy, dividing us as a people into warring factions over absolutely nothing -- and often it would seem for no better reason than to have something to bicker about on radio talk shows. When I wrote my book, Civilization and Its Enemies, I said that we had not yet comprehended the significance of 9/11. Today we are not any closer to understanding it; and, indeed, as a nation we seem to be drifting farther and farther away from the true issues raised by it. The Bush administration has announced that its campaign theme will be that we are in Iraq to keep other 9/11's from happening on our soil; but how could anyone who understood the first 9/11 possibly think such a thing? If the first 9/11 was brought to us by Arab nationals living in Hamburg, acting out a fantasy, how could the occupation of Iraq have prevented it then, and how could it prevent another such event in the future? Here is a genuine issue for the Democrats to criticize. They could point to it and say, "This shows that the Bush administration does not really yet understand the nature of the beast that we are dealing with." And yet, instead of taking on this question, they insist on beating up the President for daring to remind the American people that 9/11 ever occurred. The Bush campaign can be justly rebuked for trying to argue that anything we can do in Iraq will prevent another 9/11, because of all people they should know better. But what rebuke is appropriate for those who wish to pretend that 9/11 never happened at all? techcentralstation.com