Domingo-Cabarrubias 75 industry” because the service entails interactive communication with the clients or customers (Ofreneo et al. 2007). A call center is generally a customer-interactive office set-up consisting of computers hooked up to the internet and manned by accent neutralized or product trained operators who respond to inquiries or complaints from callers or customers calling from countries where a particular product or service is being marketed, produced and/or sold (San Jose 2007). Because of the time difference, customers in North America and Europe are serviced by call operators of Asia, mainly from India and the Philippines, logging in for work at night. The birth of the call center/BPO industry was closely associated with the advent of ICT-enabled services such as data encoding, customer service, and business process outsourcing to countries such as the Philippines, India and China (San Jose 2007). According to San Jose, outsourcing was an effort to exploit segments of the labor market within the developed countries where wages were lower, to increase profit. Eventually, with the integration of economies brought about by globalization, outsourcing or offshoring has become a means to exploit the global reserve army, especially in the developing countries such as India. In a broad sense, outsourcing is the relocation of business processes from one country to another, which includes key business processes such as production, or services, where there is a significant reduction in labor costs (Amante 2008). As described by San Jose (2007), global outsourcing, or off-shoring, is engaging in international division of labor so as to tap the comparative advantages that locations or countries have, in terms of the cheapest sources of quality labor, technology, market access, and other value added of doing business. Companies in developed countries benefit immensely from this set-up. According to Palatino (2009), by taking advantage of highly-skilled and low-value labor in poorer economies such as ours, foreign firms gain an estimated net savings of 20-40 percent on labor costs. Citing a 2004 study, Pineda-Ofreneo (2005) remarked that foreign companies save a lot by transferring jobs to the Philippines because of the wage differential – whereas the average call center employee in the U.S. gets USD4,000 a month, in the Philippines, the rate ranges from USD300 to 400. On the other hand, Palatino