Campaigning for rail transit

Who says rail transit won’t produce jobs?

I Mua Rail, a campaign launched by Pacific Resource Partnership, is hiring people for up to 35 hours a week to promote Honolulu’s rail transit project in the weeks leading up to the Nov. 6 election.

Workers would canvass neighborhoods, going door to door to deliver literature — just like an election campaign.

Of course, the words "rail transit" won’t appear on the ballot. But "Ben Cayetano" will, and the former governor has vowed to stop the project if elected mayor. His opponent, Kirk Caldwell, plans to complete it.

And while the future of rail may lie ultimately with the courts, the Honolulu mayor’s race is one in which the issues truly matter.

Or one issue, at least.

Can pidgin be outsourced?

The bad rap on call centers is that odd experience when you’re expecting help for a localized problem and the customer representative at the other end of the line responds with a thick Southern twang or a heavy Indian accent.

Welcome to the wonderful world of outsourcing. And being thousands of miles out in the Pacific Ocean won’t stop Hawaii from getting a growing piece of that action.

In fact, Xerox Corp. is now gearing up its call center operations, hiring 100 full-time customer services reps in Honolulu for mainly short-term jobs through mid-November, to help its employer clients disseminate health insurance information.

We can hear it now: "Eh brah, so you goin’ change to one nuddah health plan, li’ dat?"