A Founders Vision
David Neeleman, the founder and current CEO of JetBlue, is a 45-year-old American of Dutch ancestry born in Brazil. Neeleman is a devout Mormon who baptized over 200 hundred converts during his missionary work in the slums of Rio de Janeiro. Neeleman’s faith has a profound effect on how he lives his life and runs his company(Friedman 36-37). It his own personal belief that:
Society will be better off if more mothers are able to stay at home with their young children but are given a chance to be wage earners at the same time (Friedman 37).Neeleman began “homesourcing”, a term he helped coin, at Morris Air, an airline that he founded and headed before he sold it off to Southwest for $130 million. Morris Air employed over 250 people to run its reservation service (Shellenbarger R12). When Neeleman decided to found his next airline he decided that he was going “to have 100 percent reservation at home.” It was this philosophy that has guided the firms reservation system ever since (Friedman 37-38).
Homesourcing the JetBlue Way
JetBlue currently employees some 1000 people (representing nearly one percent of the overall homesourced workforce) in its home reservation system; the vast majority of the employees are Mormon women who live in the Salt Lake City area. Most of the women are in their thirties and work part time in a 24-hour split-shift rota (Keating D1). Home reservationists work on average twenty-five hours a week and must come into the JetBlue regional office in Salt Lake City for at least four hours a month to learn new skills and be brought up to date on what is going on within the company (Keating D1).
JetBlue and Outsourcing
So far, JetBlue has resisted the temptation to outsource. The firm has focused more on the productivity gains that are available from homesourcing instead of the wage arbitrage opportunities that are found in India and other low cost labor countries. Neeleman has taken a strong stance against outsourcing saying:
We will never outsource to India. The quality we can get here is far superior… [Employers] are more willing to outsource to India than to their own homes, and I can’t understand that. Somehow they think that people need to be sitting in front of them or some boss they have designated. The productivity we get here more than makes up for the India [wage] factor (Friedman 38).Each JetBlue home reservationist is thirty percent more productive than their traditional counterpart. These productivity gains coupled with high employee loyalty and low employee turnover have provided sufficient reductions in cost to make homesourcing competitive with outsourcing to lower labor cost countries. Domestic homesourced workers also provide a greater understanding of local social and cultural issues that foreign workers may lack (Nevius A34).
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