Offshore outsourcing: Little effect on US jobs?

WASHINGTON - The trend toward U.S. IT and manufacturing companies outsourcing jobs to other countries has so far had little effect on the overall U.S. job market, supporters of offshore outsourcing and some economists argued Thursday, but others predicted the national debate over the issue will get hotter as more jobs move.

With most estimates saying 500,000 or fewer U.S. jobs have moved offshore to countries like India, offshore outsourcing has had little impact on the U.S. unemployment rate, which stood at 5.9 percent in November, said defenders of the practice during a forum, sponsored by the Information Policy Institute, in Washington, D.C. Instead, a more complex series of problems is causing the current "jobless" economic recovery, with the U.S. economy failing to create new jobs over the past two years, said Erica Groshen, assistant vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

The U.S. has a workforce of about 130 million people, and a few hundred thousand jobs being shifted overseas should have little impact on the number of jobs in the U.S. in the long-term, Groshen said, although she acknowledged that individuals who lose jobs will be negatively affected. As the U.S. continues to move the production of "mature" products overseas -- and writing computer code will soon be a mature industry -- those displaced workers will help the U.S. develop new innovations, which is the country's strength, she said.

"The workers released from (outsourced jobs) will go on to develop the next big thing," Groshen said.

While Groshen and representatives of the U.S. IT industry defended offshore outsourcing as potentially good for the U.S., others raised warning flags. The argument that offshore outsourcing "frees up labor that can be redeployed" may not make sense to a U.S. worker who's just been laid off, said Ron Blackwell, chief economist for the AFL-CIO. "That's not exactly how I'd phrase it," he said of outsourcing freeing up labor.

When the offshore outsourcing of manufacturing started, proponents said U.S. residents shouldn't worry about those low-wage jobs, Blackwell said. College graduates were told not to worry about their jobs, but now U.S. companies are beginning to send programming, accounting and other jobs requiring college degrees overseas, he said. "With this second wave, (college graduates) are precisely the group this outsourcing of IT is hitting hardest," he said.

About 2 million residents of India graduate with college degrees every year, and face an unemployment rate of about 20 percent, said Martin Kenney, senior project director at the Berkeley Roundtable on International Economy and a professor at the University of California, Davis. Those numbers give India a great incentive to attract U.S. jobs, he said.

"You look 10 years out, and the numbers get very huge," Kenney said of the potential for outsourcing.

But political tensions in parts of the world may keep the offshore outsourcing numbers from growing as fast as some predict. "If Pakistan and India have a nuclear war, your call center could be in trouble," he said. "Things could change on a dime."

Supporters of offshore outsourcing argued the practice can save companies money, encourage other countries to buy U.S. products and allow U.S. workers to focus on a company's core products. Some companies have reported savings of 40 percent to 80 percent by moving some businesses processes out of the U.S., Kenney said.