MILTON-FREEWATER – Sykes Enterprises Inc. will close its Milton-Freewater customer call center on or before May 2, putting 264 people out of work.

“It is currently anticipated that this closure will be temporary in nature, but the long-term prospects for this call center are dependent on future business levels and customer requirements,” said James C. Hobby Sr., Sykes vice president, in a memo to employees Tuesday.

“Based on the best information we have available today, the last date of operation is scheduled for May 2, 2004, and all employees working will be terminated on that date,” Hobby said in the memo. “There are no bumping rights applicable to employees terminated as a result of this closing. You will be compensated through your 60-day notice period for what would be your normal hours of work, unless you voluntarily leave beforehand or you are terminated for just cause.”

Effective this week, Sykes cut its full-time employees to 32 hours a week, so apparently that is the level of pay they will receive until the center closes. Sykes’ officials declined to respond to reporters’ questions.

Andrea Burnett, Sykes manager of public and media relations in Tampa, Fla., said the firm is consolidating locations.

“Sykes remains committed to its employees and plans to work with the appropriate job assistance agencies to try to lessen the impact on employees transitioning out of Sykes,” she said.

Sue Niederwerfer of the CAPECO Workforce Development Department, Pendleton, said her agency, the Oregon Employment Department and WorkSource Walla Walla will conduct workshops at Sykes Monday and Tuesday to help the employees find new opportunities.

“We’re going to give these people choices of who they want to work with,” she said. “We’ll hand out materials to help them through this process.”

Later in March or early April, Niederwerfer said the CAPECO Workforce Development Department will offer orientation sessions with its other partners, the Employment Department, the vocational rehabilitation agency and Blue Mountain Community College, for Sykes employees.

In a required Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification to the Oregon Department of Community Colleges and Workforce Development, Hobby said 264 employees would be terminated when the business closes. He listed them as 234 technicians, 12 team managers, four reports analysts, three human resources assistants, two adherence councilors, two client service managers and other managers and administrators.

Sykes’ Milton-Freewater site is just the latest in a series of closures. Last month Sykes closed its call center in Klamath Falls, and told employees in Hays, Kan., it will close its call center there, which employed 370 last year, according to The Associated Press.

Sykes also is closing of its Pikeville, Ky., call center, the second of four call centers the firm located in the rural Kentucky-Virginia Appalachian mountains over the past four years.

According to a copyright story by My Wise County, an online publication in Wise, Va., the Pikeville closure leaves 341 without jobs in addition to the 393-employee Hazard call center closed just seven months ago. All the jobs are being outsourced to low-wage nations.

In early February, Sykes said an unspecified number of layoffs would take place at its 4-year-old call center in Palatka, Fla., according to The Palatka Daily News. And The Associated Press reported the company will close a center Ada, Okla., this month.

Last year Sykes closed centers in Bismarck, N.D., Greeley, Colo., Scottsbluff, Neb., and Eveleth, Minn., leaving several hundred more call center operators without jobs.

Sykes has shifted its focus to moving jobs overseas to the Philippines, the People’s Republic of China, India, El Salvador and Costa Rica, moving 2,300 jobs to foreign outsourced locations in 2002 alone.

The firm said recently it “anticipates adding between 4,000 and 5,000 seats in its offshore markets, bringing the company’s targeted seats offshore to between 9,600 and 11,000” by mid-year 2004.

Sykes is accelerating its offshore ramp-up. Though 27 percent of its global call center seat capacity was offshore as of June 30, 2003, analyst Jeff Nevins of First Analysis Securities Corp. in Chicago said in a recent report he expects the figure to reach 50 percent, or about 10,300 seats, by the middle of this year.

At the height of the dot-com boom, the Sykes’ stock soared to $52.25. At its lowest point it traded at $2.75, but has recently recovered to about $7 per share.

“Sykes’ offshore value proposition is being extremely well received in the marketplace and we are encouraged by the firming sales pipeline. This receptiveness by the marketplace is due to investments in our offshore operations,” company president John H. Sykes as he reported the most recent earnings.

Low wages, even for English-speaking workers overseas, are a key attraction; telephone operators can be hired in India for less than $1 per hour, according to a recent study by the University of California-Berkeley.