Yellow Pages moving jobs from St. Pete to India
By MICHAEL SASSO | The Tampa Tribune

Idearc Media, the company behind the Verizon Yellow Pages and Superpages.com, will eliminate more than 150 jobs in St. Petersburg as it shifts some phone directory work to an India-based outsourcing company.

Those losing their jobs are back-office workers who enter advertising data into the computer, create advertising graphics and lay out the phone directory.

Idearc currently employs about 245 people in its phone directory publishing division in St. Petersburg. The company will keep about 90 of those workers in St. Petersburg, but lay off the rest as it shifts work to Tata Consultancy Services of Mumbai.

A few Idearc layoffs will be offset as Tata builds a small workforce in St. Petersburg. Tata is expected to hire 11 or 12 people from St. Petersburg for Idearc, but other work will be done in India, said Andy Shane, a spokesman for Dallas-based Idearc Media.

Idearc is transferring work to Tata Consultancy over the next year. Meanwhile, it is trying to help affected workers find employment outside Idearc and will provide severance benefits to qualified workers, Shane said.

Jobs also will be lost in two other cities where Idearc has phone directory publishing operations, Los Alamitos, Calif., and Everett, Wash., Shane said.

Not yet a household name, Idearc Media was created when Verizon spun off its phone directory business in 2006. Idearc still has more than $9 billion of debt on its books from the spin-off.

The company filed for Chapter 11 protection in Dallas in March and hopes to shed much of the debt in the bankruptcy process.

The company hopes to exit bankruptcy protection soon, Shane said.

"This outsourcing is part of an overall company initiative to become a more efficient company," Shane said in an e-mail.

Besides the Yellow Pages, Idearc also publishes phone directory white pages in some communities, the Superpages.com Web site and some direct mail ads.

Idearc joins a list of employers outsourcing work from Tampa Bay in recent years.

Coca-Cola Enterprises bottling company began cutting about 150 jobs in Brandon last year after it struck a contract with outsourcing provider Capgemini. The work was expected to move to India, Guatemala or Poland.

JPMorgan Chase last year announced it would shift 300 jobs from its campus in Seffner to JPMorgan Chase offices in Manila and Mumbai.

Nielsen Media Research in Oldsmar said it would move about 170 jobs to Tata Consultancy Services. That was after Nielsen had taken government incentives to creating jobs. Nielsen insisted it still expected to add more jobs in Oldsmar.

If the economy continues sluggish, companies may find it easier to cut costs than to increase their sales, said Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a frequent speaker on outsourcing.

Shipping work to lower-cost countries is one way to cut costs, Hira said.

Some banks have been hesitant to outsource work, he added, because they received bailout money from the federal government. As they pay back the money, they may feel freer to send more work overseas, he said.

Economic development officials for Pinellas County and St. Petersburg said they weren't aware of Idearc receiving any government incentives, which often are in the form of tax rebates.

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