Outsourcing America's Future
Outsourcing of jobs is nothing new in the manufacturing sector. Millions of good factory jobs have been disappearing for years—2.7 million since 2001 alone—largely from corporations moving operations offshore in a race for the cheapest labor costs.
But “old economy” jobs, we were told, would be replaced by new ones in the high tech and white collar information service sector. What happened to the promise of the Information Age? It turned out that information technologies made it possible for companies to outsource those jobs, too.
- Contributing to a net loss of 1.7 million private sector jobs over the past three years was the offshoring of at least 750,000 high tech jobs in 2002-03. (Source: the high-tech trade association AeA. But no one knows the full extent of offshoring because our government doesn't track it.)
- The trend is accelerating: the University of California-Berkeley estimates that 14 million jobs are vulnerable to moving overseas in the next few years.
- Offshoring has become a flashpoint issue as we learn the range of jobs that now are moving to India, Malaysia, Eastern Europe and China—computer
programmers, network engineers, telephone service reps, radiologists, accountants, cartoon animators, journalists and others.
- Besides sending jobs abroad, major companies also shed core business functions by outsourcing services, such as call center work, to cheap U.S. contractors that pay lower wages and few if any benefits.
- Outsourcing of our best-paying jobs, both globally and domestically, has contributed to a general decline in worker living standards. In the past year, 80% of working families saw a drop in real wages despite healthy gains in worker productivity. Of new jobs created in the past year, 90% are in low-wage fields, says the Economic Policy Institute.
- There are many familiar names among the companies who outsource and offshore jobs, including AT&T, GE, Dell, and many others. Read more.
