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June 25, 2009

Sitel to close its doors, lay off 409 employees

MARY MEAUX

PORT ARTHUR — Sitel call center will soon close their doors and more than 400 employees will be out of work.

Andrew Kokes, spokesperson for Sitel, said the Port Arthur office will shut down on Aug. 29.

Kokes said 409 employees will be laid off but did not specify if the employees were full time or management.

“The closure is due to changing business needs,” Kokes said via phone on Thursday.

The Sitel spokesperson said the closure does not reflect on the customer care provided by the employees.

The call center has been through a number of changes through the years.

In the early 2000’s, call centers such as Spherion and the West Corporation were seeking hundreds of employees with the lure of a comprehensive benefit package and above minimum wage pay.

A few years later Spherion was purchased by ClientLogic with locations in both Nederland and Port Arthur.

Fast forward to January 2007 — ClientLogic acquired Sitel and decided to keep the worldwide Sitel name. Later that year the company announced the consolidation of the two offices. All of the employees affected were retained and the combined workforce moved to the Port Arthur location, according to News’ archives.

The 409 locals soon to be unemployed will likely make a large impact on future unemployment numbers.

Most recently unemployment figures released for May 2009 showed Port Arthur inching up 1 percent, from 12.1 percent to 13.1 percent, according to information released from Texas Workforce Commission.

The jobs lost were mostly in the construction and petrochemical fields. The spike in unemployment occurred about the same time as the slow down mode at one of the local refineries, Robert Foster, a local labor market analyst for the Texas Workforce Commission, said in a previous story.

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