Meet Toronto Hydro’s Bangalore team.

Companies that supply goods and service to Toronto Hydro may get their payments courtesy of a contracting firm with employees in Bangalore, in southern India.

Indian technicians are also working to produce digital versions of Toronto Hydro engineering drawings.

Toronto Hydro says the amount of work being contracted abroad is less than one per cent of over-all capital and operating spending, and no jobs have been lost.

But the union representing hydro workers says a principle is involved for the company, which is owned by the City of Toronto.

“Any amount is wrong,” said John Camilleri, president of Canadian Union of Public Employees Local One.

He has written to Mayor Rob Ford asking about city policy on outsourcing work to foreign countries, but hasn’t received a reply to his April 23 inquiry.

In an interview, Toronto Hydro executives said two kinds of operations have resulted in work going to India.

One is a portion of Toronto Hydro’s operation of making payments to suppliers.

The work has been contracted to a New Jersey firm, which instructs Toronto Hydro suppliers to mail invoices to a post office box in Jersey City, N.J.

Alternatively, they can submit invoices electronically to an e-mail address.

“All seven A/P staff (four in Bangalore and three here) would be able to sign into the mail box,” reads an internal memo. A/P stands for accounts payable. Elsewhere, the memo also refers to the “Bangalore team.”

The accounts payable service produces digital versions of invoices, which are then sent to Toronto Hydro’s bank. The bank then issues the payments, said Toronto Hydro vice president Blair Peberdy.

Toronto Hydro sent a request for proposals to 13 firms for the accounts payable work, he said. Five were Canadian. One made the short list of finalists, but ultimately the New Jersey firm made the best business case.

A second type of work is also being done in India, through a Toronto company called RMSI Private Ltd.

Peberdy said the company was hired to scan and produce digital versions of Toronto Hydro engineering plans.

Neither contract resulted in job losses, according to Peberdy and Toronto Hydro’s chief financial officer J.-S. Couillard.

The small number of accounts payable staff affected were redeployed within the company, Peberdy said.

As for RMSI, no existing employees were affected, Peberdy said.

“They’re a digital imaging service that we’ve never done in-house, and it didn’t make sense for us to take that on as an internal job,” Peberdy said in an interview.

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The contractors in both cases are paid for each unit of work they do, and the firms work for many companies, so it’s not possible to say how many jobs the contracted work represents, Peberdy said.

Toronto Hydro says it spends about $200,000 a year on accounts payable outsourcing, and $500,000 a year on digitized drawings.

That compares with $650 million in over-all annual operating and capital spending.

Couillard said Toronto Hydro looks for local suppliers “if it makes sense.”

But Toronto Hydro has an obligation to act in the best interest of ratepayers, said Peberdy, and that means keeping costs low.

Camilleri’s perspective is different.

He’s concerned about jobs that move anywhere outside the city.

“For us, it’s about protecting good jobs, technical jobs that can be done here in Toronto,” he said.

“Toronto Hydro is a public company. It should have good standards, good policies and serve the people of Toronto, not the people outside Toronto.”

Camilleri also questioned whether in the long term it’s cheaper to contract out, arguing that the practice erodes the company’s competence.

“”The city’s not doing what it’s supposed to do — make sure we have a reliable source of energy and a reliable workforce,” he said.

More stories by John Spears on Thestar.com

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