Congress looks for ways to slow offshore hiring

Tax breaks are urged during hearing on the 'offshoring' of high-skill jobs Monday

"The U.S. IT industry finds itself in the difficult position of trying to respond to pricing pressure from abroad while trying to maintain its domestic talent pool," Miller said. "We cannot legislate or regulate ourselves out of this perplexing situation. I don't want to diminish the angst felt by IT workers who have lost their jobs or are in fear of losing their jobs ... but I also believe we cannot overreact to what, up until now, has been a short-term situation."

Responding to criticisms from some committee members that U.S. companies were simply trying to pay less than $2 an hour to IT workers overseas, Miller said the issue is more complicated than that. "If the only issue were dollars per hour that people were paid, the whole industry would've disappeared already," Miller said.

Others, including a quality assurance (QA) engineer laid off by Palm in August, disagreed with Miller's argument that cheaper labor wasn't the only cause of U.S. companies moving IT jobs offshore. Natasha Humphries, who worked at Palm for more than three years, testified that she was laid off in August after training workers in India how to do QA work. Those workers made $5 per hour or less, compared to U.S. workers who made $30 an hour or more, she said.

The reason for the layoffs in Palm's U.S. QA staff was "pretty much the bottom line," Humphries said. As Palm began hiring offshore workers, Humphries met with her supervisors several times to ask them how she could improve her skills to keep her job, but she was discouraged from learning new programming or scripting languages, she said.

Palm did not immediately respond to Humphries' testimony.

"Offshoring has created a devastating economic climate, not just among Silicon Valley technical workers, but through the United States," said Humphries, now a member of TechsUnite.org, an alliance of technology workers. "Offshoring will prolong the economic recovery period as the number of U.S. jobs quickly diminish over time."

The number of unemployed electrical engineers in the U.S. stands at an historic high, added Ronil Hira, chairman of the R&D Policy Committee for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers -- United States of America (IEEE-USA). During a U.S. recession in the late '80s, unemployment for electrical engineers hovered around 2 percent, he said, but today, unemployment stands at 6.7 percent for electrical engineers and 6.9 percent for computer hardware engineers.

Many of those unemployed are engineers with years of experience, he said. Hira called on companies planning to move jobs offshore to give adequate notice to employees and the government, so that both have time to respond.

"Right now (employees) are being blindsided," Hira said. "We need a national strategy for dealing with this phenomenon."

Representative Nydia Velázquez, a New York Democrat, called on Congress to adopt new tax laws encouraging U.S. companies to keep their jobs at home and to rethink its free trade agreements. The U.S. IT sector could see the same declines as the U.S. manufacturing industry if Congress does not act to protect it from foreign competition, Velázquez said.