This is one of those good news-bad news stories. The good news is that REZsolutions, a national hotel reservation and marketing company opened a call center for hotel reservations in Providence in March, employing 100 with plans to double that.
The bad news is one of the main reasons they came here is because there are so many Rhode Islanders who are underemployed.
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Translated that means that REZsolutions was able to hire better quality employees to the $7 to $9 an hour jobs it was offering, a better workforce with greater motivation for improvement, said Len Norten, vice president for operations for the Phoenix, Arizona based company.
John Swen, director of the Economic Development Corporation, concedes that there are a number of underemployed Rhode Islanders, and points to efforts to attract higher skilled industries to the state. But, Swen also insists that there is a need for jobs like those that are being offered by REZsolutions.
And obviously, he’s correct, since Norten says the company has not had any difficulty filling the positions.
Rhode Island, he said, was chosen as the call center for its Anasazi Travel Resource Inc. because of the quality of its workforce, and proximity to clients in the central and eastern U.S.
The Rhode Island call center serves as a reservations center for major hotel chains, and Norten said he expects that within a few months the company will add other upscale hotels at the Rhode Island facility, leading eventually to a doubling of its employment here.
Norten said it is the only hotel reservation facility the company operates in the Northeast.
The company, overall, operates out of 56 offices, with its headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona and regional business centers in New York, London and Singapore. REZsolutions, which employs 2,000 people, describes itself as a provider of technology-based systems, reservations and distribution networks, private label services and marketing programs for the hospitality industry.
In Providence, the company’s call center operates seven-days a week, with most of the 100 employees working full-time, Norten said. For the company, the relaxation of the Sunday work law was an important issue. With the change in the law REZsolutions no longer has to pay overtime pay rates for Sunday work, even if it falls within an employee’s regular workweek.
The Sunday rule still holds for manufacturing, an area that Swen says he hopes will be addressed soon by the legislature.
The relaxation of the law for industries like REZsolutions came about, Swen said, because these industries were not already here and were no threat to the unions that have opposed changes to the Sunday work law. But manufacturing,
Swen said, is different because labor already represents a number of employees in that sector.
Meanwhile, the change in the law for the service sector has helped companies like REZsolutions, and call centers set up by Fleet Financial, Fidelity, Citizens Bank, and other financial services companies.
“It’s very important. It’s also very important prospectively, for some of the financial services firms that are running call centers and 24 (hours) — seven (days a week) operations,” Swen said.
“I really have to credit the leadership in the unions for understanding that was really important to our recruitment story to address that issue. It was very important for two reasons — dollars and cents and the state’s attitude toward recruiting companies and their attitude toward businesses in general. It’s a very positive sign how we think how do we make these companies successful.”
In terms of manufacturing, Swen said he hopes the issue will be addressed in the next legislative session.
“We’d like to make more progress in this area,” he said. “To be fair to the labor groups, they have a lot of membership in those communities. For them it is a tough issue. For a call center, those employees don’t exist yet. So you’re not changing anybody in mid-stream. For the manufacturing sector that’s not the case; there are people working Sunday shifts who are paid time and a half. If that changed there would be money out of their pocket.”
But Swen firmly believes that if the law were changed it would add jobs, union jobs.
“We very much believe more jobs would be created, more union jobs would be created,” he said. “I believe that’s true, but at the same time you have to acknowledge that there are people who are earning X dollars a week and that will be cut and you have to deal with that. One of the issues we’ve talked about is possibly grandfathering it in or phasing it in over several years.
That’s a real problem. People in organized labor have a constituency to represent and they don’t want to let them down. We’re working with them to try and figure out how to do that, how can we get to a place where we can really create an incentive for people to create jobs and grow the company, but not to do that on the backs of the people who are working there now.”
