I took a picture of a shining building with the label Teleperformance in Murray. So, I decided to research the firm. Teleperformance is a French based company with with 450 contact centers in 83 countries. They are reported to have over 380,000 employees.
Apparently this company responded to the pandemic by allowing a sizeable chunk of its employee base to work from home.
The wikipedia article makes it appear that the company was founded in 1978 and that most of its growth came from organic expansion of a call center network.
So, I decided to research the corporate timeline.
It appears that the corporate structure traces its history to a plain vanila food producer named Société Rochefortaise de Produits Alimentaires which was founded in 1910 with its main production facility in Madagascar.
Wait a second! There might be more to this plain vanilla company.
Quick, history buffs, what happened in 1910?
Yes, you got the answer right!
1910 was the year of the Mexican Revolution!
What does the Mexican Revolution have with Madagascar?
You got it right twice in a row!
The Mexican Revolution disrupted the world's Vanilla supply!
Vanilla is native to Mexico. The little bees that pollinate vanilla are found only in Mexico.
There are no native pollinators for the vanilla orchid in Madagascar. How could Madagascar produce vanila?
That story is really bizarre.
French Colonists had imported the vanilla bean to the Île de Bourbon in the South China Sea. Île de Bourbon is now called Réunion. Botanists had the orchid in 1820 but could not coax it to produce beans.
In 1841 a 12-year-old boy named Edmund Albius developed a trick for pollinating vanilla. This is the picture from Wikicoomons:
Did I mention that Albius was a slave owned by a French Botanist?
The French outlawed slavery in its colonies in 1848.
Since Albius was an owned person when he discovered the technique to pollinate vanilla, he could not own his IP and became a poor free man.
Albius ended up hiring on as a kitchen servant in St Denis.
One day he was arrested for stealing jewelry.
Albius languished in prison for a while. But since he created a new industry, the courts decided to commute his sentence.
Albius languished in poverty and died in 1880.
At least he wasn't in prison and wasn't owned.
But lets get back to the story.
Albius's method of pollinating vanilla is labor intensive. It involves poking vanilla flowers with a toothpick to access a stamen then moving pollin from the stamen to a pistil. Vanilla plantations need a large work force that would spend its day pollinating flowers like busy little bees.
The French began asserting control over Madagascar in 1882 with a political entity called Malagasy Protectorate. The French took full control of the island in 1895.
The French had abolished slavery but instituted a practice called "corvée labor" to populate the French Plantations.
Yes, forced labor is so much more humane than slavery.
But, I want to get back to my story.
1910 was a pivotal year when Madagascar transitioned to becoming the world's leading supplier of vanilla. Le Société Rochefortaise de Produits Alimentaires formed in Paris with an intent of develoing food products in the French colony of Madagascar.
I contend that they had vanilla on their minds.
International development of food production makes economic sense. The Madagascar summer aligns with the French Winter. I would love to find out more about this early company. They probably had a large number of interesting adventures as they sought to develop international agriculture.
It is likely that some negative things happened as well as they had to deal with the plantation system in a distant colony.
The company muddled through World World I.
During World War II Madagascar came under the control of the Vichy Government. I suspect things became quite corrupt.
The anti-colonial sentiment after WWII would have forced French Companies to divest their assets abroad. So the company founded as Le Société Rochefortaise de Produits Alimentaires became a conglomerate holding diverse equities.
By the 1970s, the conglomerate focused primarily on communications and marketing. In 1978 they acquired a communication firm called Duprat et Durant and began focussing on communications as Société Rochefortaise de Communication.
In 1978 an entrepreneur named Daniel Julien founded Teleperformance in Paris as a call center with 10 telephone lines.
At some point Teleperformance began dealing with Rochefortaise Communication. In 1980,
Société Rochefortaise de Communication formed a complex merger that acquired Teleperformance. This company focussed on creating a structure that would allow companies to oursource their call center.
The conglomerate eventually changed its name to SR Teleperformance. SR Teleperformance engaged in an aggressive expansion involving both acquisition of companies and the construction of new call centers. One of the most notable acquisitions involved buying the AOL Call Center in Ogden.
The full history of this company would have involved large numbers of people moving from flower to flower to pollinate vanilla to large numbers of people sitting before work stations answering telephone calls.
In 2020, the company acquired a huge company called Health Advocate. This positions the company as a major player in the health care market.
As I understand, most of the work at a call center involves reading scripts into a telephone. The primary threat to this workforce would be voice recognition technology combined with AI.
It is interesting to research the history of firms in one's community. I contend that when researching the history of businesses, one should follow the chain of ownership and not brand names. Wikipedia only follows brand names. But companies change their names! This huge company was created by a merger of a dozen companies. The central corporate structure traces to a food company formed in 1910 with the goal of developing agriculture in Madagascar.
The workforce in this shiny building in Murray is part of an International Firm with over 380,000 employees. I published the timeline for Teleperformance on iRivers.com
