CLINTWOOD, Va. — This remote Appalachian town doesn't get many visitors, but every day it sends thousands of travelers on their way. If you buy an airline ticket off the Travelocity website and need to call with a change or a question, the phone rings here.
The Travelocity call center brought 250 jobs to a community wounded by the decline of coal mining, its mainstay for a century. It plugged the town's 1,500 residents into the global high-tech economy, offering the prospect of a secure future.
That illusion crumbled last month when Travelocity fired Clintwood, saying it would close the call center by year-end and move all the jobs to India. The Internet, far from being the town's salvation, is threatening it with collapse.
Opened fewer than three years ago, the center is the largest private employer in the county.
"I figured it would be here forever, like Wal-Mart," said Greg Owens, 29, who joined Travelocity after being laid off from a job at a private school in northern Virginia. "Most of us are just praying for something else to come in."
The closing of the call center in Clintwood and two others in nearby towns demonstrates American companies' increasing efforts to outsource jobs to India, the Philippines, Russia, Malaysia and other far-flung places.
As high-speed data cables wire the world, locales with cheap labor can gain jobs -- and those with expensive labor can lose them. The call center clerks in Clintwood start at $8 an hour. In India, their replacements will earn less than a quarter of that.
These towns' struggles also show some of the difficulties that many communities will encounter if, as experts predict, outsourcing continues to grow. More than a quarter of the 2.25 million call-center jobs in the U.S. are expected to go offshore.
The towns are painfully learning that they need to develop jobs, companies and resources that can't be easily relocated. But that isn't a simple mission for low-wage, low-skilled workforces like those in Appalachia. Like much of rural America, the area has seen a brain drain for decades.
Some critics see no hope. "Unless we can reverse some of these trade inequalities, the working class will simply be ruined. They'll flip burgers, go on welfare or sell drugs," said Lewis Loflin, an adjunct professor at Virginia Highlands Community College in nearby Abingdon who runs a website criticizing the region's failed efforts at economic development.
