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...offshore outsourcing.
The issue white collar jobs moving overseas is on the national and many states' policy agendas because it has the potential to have a profound impact on the economy, jobs, technological innovation and politics. While there has been a parallel movement of manufacturing jobs offshore, which may have an even more significant impact, this article focuses on flight of white collar jobs.
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Uncertainties in the Policy Debate
The trend has been widely reported in recent months, but the policy discussion has been clouded by a number of uncertainties including how many and what types of jobs are moving overseas. An oft-cited report by Forrester Research, published in November 2002, predicted that 3.3 million white collar service jobs would move offshore by 2015. Predictions have come in a flurry from other consulting firms, many of whom offer advice to companies on how to move work offshore, including Gartner, Deloitte & Touche, A.T. Kearney, and McKinsey. The problem with these studies is that they are educated guesses of a trend that is just emerging. As with most emerging phenomena, no good forecasting models exist. In fact, political interest groups have used the uncertainty in the forecasts to their advantage, with some predicting dire consequences while others claim that the forecasts are hyperbole. (1) Unfortunately, no relief from this uncertainty is in sight. The U.S. Commerce and Labor Departments have no system for tracking the number of jobs moving overseas, and there are no plans for implementing one. Additionally, in the hope to limit employee backlash, companies are keeping their labor "rebalancing" plans secret. They are not disclosing these plans to domestic employees or are instituting clauses in severance packages that force employees to be silent about their impending termination. In some cases domestic employees have been forced to train their overseas replacements. In other cases, many domestic employees fear that they will be blacklisted if they speak out.
This new competitiveness debate is significantly different than the one the U.S. had in the 1980s because workers and not companies are losing. In the 1980s many companies, including most prominently the semiconductor industry, went to governments for relief from foreign competition. The firms and their importance to a locality...
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