Anti-offshoring legislation heats up

Bills related to offshoring or outsourcing, some of which would severely limit or outright stop those practices, were introduced this year in nearly all 50 states as well as in the U.S. Congress and there is no indication that legislative trend will stop.

Of the bills that have actually become laws, most seem to lack teeth and in some cases have had negative consequences by costing states millions of dollars more to pay for contracts with call centers in the U.S. rather than in other countries. But lobbying efforts to pass stronger legislation appear to be intensifying.

"I think on the state level, these efforts will continue," said Stuart Anderson, executive director for the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) in Arlington, Virginia. "Once you're a state officeholder and you've introduced one bill, it doesn't take much to keep introducing bills."

Groups of service and blue-collar workers have mobilized to support laws restricting offshoring. Rescue American Jobs, for instance, has a legislation tracker at its Web site, and has as its mission the task of "building the largest American workforce mobilization in history" as a response to outsourcing and offshoring. The group, based in Pittsburgh, and supported by the United Steelworkers of America, contends that offshoring is a consequence of "executive greed" and urges its members to action.

On the other side of the spectrum is the Technology CEO Council, a group of leading IT companies, including Dell, Intel, IBM, and Motorola. The group includes on its Web site "10 common myths about worldwide sourcing," including a statistic that even some in the anti-offshoring movement will acknowledge, which is that the number of U.S. jobs lost to offshoring is a small percentage of the total workforce.

Forrester Research Inc. has forecast the number of outsourced U.S. jobs to reach 3.3 million by 2015, which translates to about 250,000 layoffs annually, according to Lael Brainard and Robert E. Litan of the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

"How should we think about that number?" they wrote in an analysis of services offshoring published in June. "It is small relative to total U.S. employment of 137 million and accounts for less than 2 percent of the roughly 15 million Americans who involuntarily lose their jobs each year. But to workers who lose their jobs, and to the far larger number of workers who worry that they will lose theirs, the foreign outsourcing total, whatever it is, resonates powerfully."

At the federal level, NFAP's Anderson expects to see continued efforts by lawmakers to curb offshoring and outsourcing by introducing amendments to pending legislation. Last year, for example, two amendments that would have restricted outsourcing of federal government work and the use of federal funds in states that permit offshoring were passed by the U.S. Senate, but ultimately were dropped by conference committees that met to hash out differences between Senate and House versions of the bills.

The amendment of bills is a political tactic: By tacking what is in effect different legislation onto, say, a budget bill, lawmakers can force the hands of colleagues who might not want to be seen as voting against the legislation, even though they may not approve of the amendment. Anderson expects that legislators will turn to data-privacy and identity-theft issues in attempts to stem the export of call-center and other jobs.