Montana "Company of the Year 2002" leaving state

[Newsjock]

http://www.missoulian.com/articles/2003/07/09/news/top/news01.txt

KALISPELL - Stream International, one of Kalispell's largest employers, announced Tuesday it will close up shop by summer's end.

The shutdown comes just three years after city leaders granted Stream a $4 million incentive package to entice the company to town.

Stream, which once employed about 900 workers, had been named the 2002 Montana Company of the Year by Gov. Judy Martz and statewide business leaders. Critics, however, had long maintained that the company did not pay a decent wage and should not have received public tax money as part of the incentive package.

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[liberalnurse]

1. I love Montana....

it breaks my heart to hear that.....The people are great, the land is Gods best kept secret...I want to move there....

[Aaron]

2. Those critics were right

Stream is probably doing just fine financially and wants to do better by moving all their call-center jobs to India. I'd be surprised if the 'new' centers they open or expand anywhere besides India consist of more than a little office space for their analysts and other administration jobs. I worked at one of their two Portland, OR locations for about 9 months (average stay was 3) back in 2000 or so. They had just opened up the Kalispell site and were employing out of work miners for $3.00 an hour less than what they were paying us. IIRC, the top people out at Kalispell that did support made $8.00 and most made $7.00 or less. Managers may have made more than that but I doubt it was anything great. When some of the companies we were contracted to do support for found out about how little the Kalispell workers were getting paid they demanded that the Kalispell workers take care of their support needs and that they get a drop in their contracted rate. Then Stream started moving stuff to India, including the support group I used to work in, but I had already left by that time.