Qwest to add 150 jobs to Boise facility – Annual payroll of $18 million may help economy

Qwest Communications International Inc. unveiled plans Tuesday to add 150 jobs to its high-tech call center in downtown Boise.

Ken Dey
The Idaho Statesman

About half of the employees have already been hired and are undergoing training to work at the company´s Boise Digital Subscriber Line technical support center.

Another 20 will be hired in the next few months and the remainder will be hired by the end of June 2004.

All the positions are union jobs, and employees have the potential of earning $40,000 a year, according to Jim Schmit, Qwest president for Idaho.

Qwest officials made the announcement with Gov. Dirk Kempthorne, who said the new jobs bode well for Idaho.

“This is one more indication that Idaho is seeing positive signs that we are emerging from the recession,” Kempthorne said.

The new wave of hires will bring the total jobs at the company´s Boise support center to more than 450.

The company first announced it was opening the DSL center in March of 2002.

Economists welcomed the news, but said it´s too soon to claim victory over the recession.

“I don´t know if it´s a direct correlation of whether we are coming out of a recession,” said John Church, president of the consulting firm Idaho Economics. “But good news is good news, and we have to take that and be grateful for what it is.

“It could have been bad news.”

Church said it´s tough to keep track of the job losses in the Treasure Valley because many are seasonal in nature, making it hard to say whether the community has fully recovered from the job losses it incurred over the past year.

Schmit said the state´s pro-business climate and the quality of the local workforce were the main reasons that Qwest selected Boise for the call center in 2002.

“Leaders at the state and local levels have been outstanding in recruiting our business, and Qwest is proud to be one of Idaho´s major employers,” Schmit said.

As part of the incentive package to bring the jobs to Idaho, the state offered more than $1 million in workforce development funds that have been used to train Qwest employees, Schmit said.

Once the new center is fully staffed, it will contribute an $18 million annual payroll to the local economy, Schmit said.

Shirl Boyce, vice president of the Boise Metro Chamber of Commerce´s Economic Development Council, said the Boise metro area could realize a total payroll impact of $37 million a year because of the additional jobs the $18 million payroll will create.

“I would say the state´s money is well spent,” Boyce said in reference to the $1 million in workforce development funds.

Some of that new payroll will likely end up in the hands of downtown businesses.

“We were ecstatic,” said Keven Burnett, Downtown Boise Association executive director.

Burnett said it´s hard to say how much the employees will spend in downtown restaurants and other retail shops, but they know there will be an impact.

“We know that people who do work downtown do tend to shop and dine downtown,” Burnett said, adding that the increased spending could also lead to a growth in jobs downtown.

Some of the new employees Qwest hired, who have faced the perils of a struggling economy, were also happy to have landed a job.

Brad Bogar, 33, was laid off last year from EDS, one of the world´s largest information technology services companies, after working for the company for more than three years. He then went to work briefly for Hewlett Packard, but was again laid off.

Bogar said he was out of work for a month and a half before landing the job at Qwest.

“It´s been up and down and a pretty scary time for techs,” Bogar said, adding that before the Qwest job came open he was considering leaving the area to look for work or accepting a lower-paying job to stay in Boise.

Bogar said that´s no longer a worry. The Qwest job pays more than what he made at EDS, he said.

The new employees will work in Qwest´s Idaho headquarters at One Capital Center in downtown Boise.

Employees at the center will handle a variety of functions, including screening and routing of all inbound calls to the appropriate Qwest technical support personnel and solving complex connection issues associated with DSL services.

To offer story ideas or comments, contact Ken Dey
[email protected] or 377-6428

http://www.idahostatesman.com/story.asp?ID=48250