Ireland is becoming a major site for back office jobs farmed out by American companies. T A Gus Jones, vice-president of the Industrial Development Authority of Ireland, told the Wall Street Journal from his New York office that he was approaching banks, insurance companies, credit-card processors and just about anyone else with at least four mainframe computers, with the message, if you can move it 3,000 miles west, you can move it 3,000 east. American back office operations in Ireland date from 1988 and include banks, computer makers, mutual-fund companies and others. Ireland’s draw is good, cheap labour. Wright Investors Service, a Bridgeport, Connecticut, investment manager and database publisher, has 85 employees in its Shannon office organising financial information from companies worldwide for Wright’s databases. Peter Donovan, president of the firm, says that the majority of them are young financial analysts on a salary of about $20,000 a year, whereas their business school counterparts in the US would be on $45,000. It is these higher-level jobs, financial analysts and technicians, that Ireland is hoping to attract although Jamaica, Singapore and many US communities will be in competition. Edward Superson, who established an office for Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co of Springfield, Massachusetts, last year, praises the diligence of the Irish, saying that excellence is the norm, contrary to the accepted 70% accuracy in the US. Turnover rate is lower than in the US, with Irish unemployment running at 20%. In addition, the difference in time zones means that Irish offices will use mainframes at off-peak hours. Ireland paved the way for the US companies by investing $3,500m in upgrading its telecommunications network in the 1980s. This coupled with tax breaks – companies pay very little tax, employment grants, training grants and construction grants, can be worth millions of dollars. However, Robert Crawford, US director of the Locate in Scotland programme, says new technologies, such as electronic scanning of printed material, will render many data-entry jobs obsolete. Scotland will continue to compete vigorously with Ireland for foreign investment for manufacturing, but isn’t interested in work processing, he says.
