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Call center would create 250 jobs
Sprint to open up shop in former Ernst building By DAVID PRESZLER
Medford is about to become "the point of contact" for some Sprint Corp. customers. The telecommunications giant will open a Medford call center next year, creating more than 250 full-time jobs. The center will open in the former Ernst Home Center building in the South Gateway Shopping Center. The jobs will pay $8-$9 an hour and feature full benefits, Sprint spokesman Tom Yates said. He also said the company offers lots of advancement opportunities. "There's some real opportunity for people here," he said. Between salaries and benefits, the company estimates the call center will generate $10 million a year for Southern Oregon's economy. It is projected to open between April and June. Sprint will formally announce its plans at a ceremony this morning at the future call center. Employees at the center will do telemarketing and sell new services to Sprint's local telephone customers. The company has 8 million local telephone customers in 18 states, in addition to its long-distance and cellular businesses. It provides local service to about 60 communities in Washington and Oregon alone, including White City, Shady Cove and other Upper Rogue River areas. Sprint now employs about 22 people in Jackson County and about 500 in Oregon.It has three call centers in the state _ two in Tualatin and one in Hood River. The Medford center will primarily handle calls from local-service customers in the nine states west of the Mississippi River that Sprint serves. Sprint officials said the company wanted to add a call center in the Pacific time zone to better serve its local-service customers. A West Coast location will extend the daily time period when a representative is available, since most of its local-service call centers are on the East Coast.Yates said the Rogue Valley was chosen for a variety of reasons, including a growing population, local colleges and universities to provide training and a quality of life Sprint hopes will attract employees. "Medford really is an ideal spot," Yates said. "It's a nice fit for us. Plus there was a building available." Work on the former Ernst building is expected to begin soon. Though the building was briefly used as a teen dance club and a discount book outlet, it has been largely vacant since Ernst closed in 1996. Sprint can occupy about 42,000 square feet of the building right away and could expand into the remaining 16,000 square feet down the road.Sprint, which is based in Kansas City, plans to merge with another large telecommunications company, MCI WorldCom. Yates said the deal, which is awaiting regulatory approval, is unlikely to affect the call center. Economic development officials hailed Sprint's arrival as another sign of the area's viability for telecommunications companies. A number of call centers have sprung up in recent years, run by companies such as U.S. Cellular and National Flora. Southern Oregon Regional Economic Development Inc. Executive Director Gordon Safley said officials have been particular about which call centers they court and said Sprint had more to offer employees than most. "The majority of them are around $6.50 an hour," he said. Though Sprint's wages may be higher than others, they don't meet the standard some groups have advocated. The Living Wage Jobs Project, sponsored by Oregon Action, is calling for hourly wages of more than $10. It cites 1996 research that said a single adult in Jackson County needed $10.36 an hour with benefits to live without public assistance in Jackson County.Project organizer Rich Rohde said the group will release a report next month calling for a "rethinking" of development in the region. The report will recommend that subsidies for development be given only on the condition that companies pay a living wage. SOREDI will help Sprint train and recruit its workforce, though it didn't provide big financial incentives to recruit the company, SOREDI's Rob Pochert said. Jackson County's job market remains tight, with unemployment near historic lows. Still, Safley and Pochert said they don't expect Sprint to have trouble finding the 250 employees it wants. "We've still got more people than we've got good jobs," Pochert said. |
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Copyright © The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA
