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"Hello, Bangalore? Where's My Unemployment Check?"

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from: Timothy Noah

Posted Thursday, April 6, 2006, at 5:55 PM ET

In Albert Brooks' underappreciated recent film, Looking For Comedy in the Muslim World, a running gag has Brooks repeatedly walking past a call center in Delhi, allowing us to overhear phone greetings on behalf of various United States companies. The salutations become ever-more incongruous until finally we hear an Indian receptionist pick up a phone and say, "This is the White House. How may I direct your call?"

As best I can tell, the White House still has stateside employees answering its phones, but state governments around the country have been contracting out all sorts of government business to American companies that promptly subcontract the work offshore. Word of the practice has trickled out in news stories here and there, prompting a hue and cry in various state legislatures but very little action. According to a study released in March by the Government Accountability Office, 48 states "offshore" at least some administration of federally funded, state-administered government programs, most of it in India and most of it involving welfare benefits. The GAO also found that states were offshoring some administration of child support enforcement and—in what seems like a cruel joke at the expense of American workers displaced by cheap foreign labor—unemployment insurance! Read it (below) and weep. For explanatory annotations and commentary, roll your mouse over the highlighted text. If you would like to read the GAO report in its entirety, click here.

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Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. This is the welfare program that replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children under the 1996 welfare-reform law.
Unemployment as of Feb. '06: Seven percent.
Unemployment as of Feb. '06: 6.6 percent.
Unemployment as of Feb. '06: 8.4 percent. This was the highest in the country (unless you count Puerto Rico, where it's 10.4 percent). Maybe that's why it didn't offshore.
hot document
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from: Timothy Noah

Posted Thursday, April 6, 2006, at 5:55 PM ET
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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.
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