I think there is another side to this.  Do we honestly believe that RBC is the only bank in Canada making these same decisions?

GRRR

Wow,

I say take the opportunity to talk to them in person.  That's pretty awesome :3

Banks are not alone in this. In fact, one would be hard pressed to name a sector not doing this kind of stuff.

Tim Horton's got permission for 15,000 TFW (Temporary Foreign Workers) from 2007-2012. The figures I saw on TFW's for 2012 was 400,000.

Now, I am not talking "buy Canadian" or "employ Canadian" protectionist rhetoric. I firmly believe that for some people to come up from poverty, others will move downward.

I am saying these workers are expoloited and there is wage supression that all Canadians deal with. The hiring of Chinese miners is cheaper than hiring qualified Canadian miners.

In-sourcing and out-sourcing is a reality.

Nobody seems to care until they find out they are out of work.

Many of the local and community newspapers outsource to India.

http://www.newswire.ca/en/story/543083/toronto-star-union-denounces-plan-for-largest-outsourcing-in-canadian-newspaper-history

Companies send work overseas all the time. Any time you call into a call centre for IT support you are usually speaking to someone not from Canada. I always ask them where they are, the weather... Some companies ask those employees to imply they are from here but I have had people ask me what province Toronto is in, not likely a Canadian
.

Companies attempt to control all costs they can and other countries offer cheaper labour.
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We all contribute to this problem by hunting for the lowest price on things we buy.
.

Need cheap running shoes, they aren't made in Canada
.

Need low cost apples, they don't come from Ontario
.

Need to hire someone to pick those apples in good weather and bad? Those workers don't come from Ontario
.

RBC is being unfairly targeted for something that everyone contributes to

Are all your clothes made in Canada Jim? And. if they are , where is the fabric made? Andif that is also from Canada, what corporation owns the store you bought them at.

We are global, we export and import goods and services.

Don't you want us to be able to export? We don't want other countries to say no to our goods and services do we?

RBC is being unfairly targetted because other companies do it , too?

Right. And many murderers get unfairly targetted because lots of other people murder, too.

Globalization, as it is commonly called, has never been more than a device for big business to rip us off - to force small countries to accept out terms, and to use the people of poor countries against the people of rich ones in order to make the people of rich countries poor. And, if the poor countries as a result get better off, then it will become time to reverse the game.

The US economy is not going to come back - certainly not in our lifetimes. Whole sections of it have been destroyed by outsourcing. The jobs are gone. they aren't coming back.

We are standing in the wreckage of an economy that was deliberately destroyed to satisfy the very, very rich. And they have done well out of it. Whether we do well is something they don't give a damn about. They never have. Why should they?

They exist to make money for themselves, not for us. And they are making their biggest profits in history. - and storing it in secret bank accounts. That's what margaret thatcher was all about - and Harper - and most American presidents.

That isn't the point. RBC is doing what makes business sense to them . Along with others.

If we don't like sending jobs overseas then we need to be either willing to do the work ourselves for that price or willing to pay the price required.

I see people upset with outsourcing
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I don't see people , including Jim and his letters, offering to pay double the price for things

.
Are these practices for profit? Of course they are.

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Do we want our companies to be profitable? Of course we do.

Our companies are profitable. In fact, they are making their biggest profits in history. The theory is that as the make profits, we prosper. The reality is that is not happening.

the income gap has real meaning. Most of us are becoming relatively poorer. A tiny group is becoming immensely richer. Companies are making a big profit. However, making a big profit is not the whole point of the game.

Another point of it is to spread general benefit from that profit. And that isn't happening.

Globalization has been a device to create weath for a few -  based on creating poverty for the many.

I don't know whether you've noticed it, but western economies have generally collapsed while the wealthiest westerners become even wealthier.

You see, it's not just making money that's the point. It's ensuring that the benefits of that prosperity are shared. That's no happening - and it hasn't been happening for a good thirty years and more.

In the end, we're living in a self-destructive system. It's a quite twisted form of capitalism. In fact, it shouldn't be called capitalism at all. it's really a welfare state for the very rich - and it creates poverty to get cheap labour.

Eventually, it destroys itself because if you make enough poverty, there's no more money to be made out of it.

It also creates unrest which has to be controlled with brain-washing (of the sort you can read every day in the news), with domestic espionage and, increasingly, police state methods - which are reaching full bloom in the US, and coming here.

To say simply that it's good for companies to make profit, and let it go at that, is to look at only a small part of the picture.

UNICEF now ranks Canada 17th among wealthy nations in the well-being of its children. The US is in 25th, down with Lithuania and Romania. That is the result of a self-destructive economic system.

It's notable that the top-ranked nations are mostly the nordic ones that do a better job than we do of distributing wealth. Unlike us and the US, those countries are run by elected governments not by billionaires. 

I went to my local Royal Bank and spoke with the manager.  I asked him to explain the ethics behind the decision to remove jobs from Canadians and give them to temporary foreign workers. 

I pointed out that the service from the Royal has been declining over the years and bank charges have increased.  Many clients of the Royal Bank are aggravated, just as I am,  by phone calls from strangers who are hired to speak with people like me - about various aspects of MY banking - things that can be done, in person, at my local branch.  This local manager may have remembered that I have expressed my dissatisfaction several times about this,

One more thing was asked of him - that he explain how this importation of foreign workers was eventually going to play out at local branches of the bank.  Was he, and the others employed thereat  risk of losing their jobs to foreigners - who would not be welcomed in a small community that was reeling from the loss of banking jobs that 'belonged' to local people!

He spluttered, waffled and could not find words to defend this situation. 

I closed my accounts and took my money to a small, locally run Credit Union.

This one has left me in a quandry. I was thinking I wasn't affected, but our investments are with Royal. My banking is with TD. But a longtime family friend is our RBC broker. I'll be speaking with her some time soon.

I see Kay the curler. You have left RBC because of these jobs. I assume your next call will be to Bell because they outsource IT work, Rogers, IBM, and others

While you are at it, be sure to not buy food to that isnt grown in canada, end of bananas and oranges for you.

Be sure to double check your closets, cupboards and everything else you buy.

Protectionism certainly starts at home.

As to RBC, 45 jobs have been outsourced, in a company that hires tens of thousands of people.

But hey, jump on the band wagon, be sure to post your experience with bell' Rogers, Telus....

companies are adapting

decentralized, peer-to-peer, digital living

welcome to the future.  welcome to now

1. lastpointe, please learn something about the history of your country. This country, like the US, was built on protectionism. Protection was demanded by big business - like the CPR, meat packers, Massey, etc.

2. Protection began as a Conservative policy, with the Liberals following suit in the 1890s. It was demanded by big business and enforced by both parties for well over a century.

3. It was abandoned in both the US and Canada when big business got all the advantage it could out of it - and now needed free trade to expand markets - mostly at the expense of small and poor countries.

4. RBC is not outsourcing 45 jobs among thousands. Nobody knows how many jobs have been outsourced from this country. The number is somewhere in the hundreds of thousands. Call the head office for Reader's Digest Canada, some day. It's in The Phillipines. Notice any drop in the price of RD? (But the pay for Canadian writers in RD has not risen in at least 30 years.)

5. This has not given us cheaper products. It has given companies higher profits - which then are hidden away in offshore accounts to avoid taxes.

6. Funny you should mention bananas. They come from Central America in countries like Guatemala where American companies operate in countries with  US government-imposed dictators. Wages are terrible, working hourse are terrible. There is virtually no health care or education. People are routinely arrested, tortured, murdered - over a quarter million were murdered in Guatemala alone - and were murdered by the dictator's troops who were armed and supplied and led by the CIA. President Clinton publicly apologized for it. But most news media didn't think it important enough to mention. Anyway, people like you wouldn't care.

The NYT carried the story.  It was about 1998. If you google Clinton Guatemala apology New York Times  that should get it. (But even if you do see it, you'll think of an excuse for ignoring it.)

7. Are you familiar with the term "wage gap"? That has been growing wildly since free trade. We don't even know how bad it is because much of the big money disappears into tax havens, and is unrecorded.

We are not benefitting from cheap products as a result of free trade because our incomes have nowhere near kept pace with inflation. All that has grown is profit. And we don't even see that.

A lot of this discussion is actually about call centre work, which is an interesting phenomenon. There's plenty of lousy-paying call centre work being done here in Canada. But it's often NOT for Canadian firms. My daughter in Canada does call centre work, and the client she represents are cable companies in Florida.

It would be a HUGE deal for me to leave RBC, which has been my bank since I was a teenager, and holds my mortgage, my investments, my accounts. I did leave Bell Canada, where I'd been a loyal customer for many years, over this sort of out-sourcing, and haven't been back. This would be a much bigger deal, though, so I'd have to be really mad, not just a little angry. Their (RBC'S) wimpy and unapologetic responses are, however, feeding the fire...

Lastpointe, I don't believe you read my second e-mail:  the issue I raised was the RBC knowlingly participating in an illegal activity, and this raising the question of how many of RBC's contractors are knowingly acting illegally.  You might not have gotten it, but Nixon did:  his statement that RBC will be reviewing its relationships with all of its contractors indicates he understands the importance that it is not only important to behave ethically; one must be perceived to behave ethically.  I, at no point in either e-mail condemn outsourcing or importing temporary foreign workers.  My issue was the RBC participating in an illegal activity.  Of course, you may believe that anything that helps corporate profitability is acceptable, legal or illegal.