'Service offshoring to have modest impact on US'

[OhioChick]

Posted online: Monday, February 12, 2007 at 1714 hours IST

Silicon Valley, February 12: Amidst the outcry in the US over outsourcing, a new report released on Monday said service offshoring would have a modest impact on its job market, although Silicon Valley, the country's technology hub, will be among the hardest hit.

Researchers expect employers to ship out about 3.4 million US service jobs to lower wage countries between 2000 and 2015, out of a civilian labour force of 153 million in January 2007, said the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based research group.

Metropolitan areas with large concentrations of information technology service jobs or backoffice jobs are generally more vulnerable to service offshoring than other metropolitan areas.

Of the 246 US metropolitan areas, 28 areas, with 13.5 per cent of the nation's population, are likely to lose between 2.6 and 4.3 per cent of their jobs to service offshoring between 2004 and 2015, which is higher than the average loss of no more than 2 per cent among the metropolitan areas studied.

http://www.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=81257

[htuttle]

1. "Business Process Outsourcing" will probably be the destruction of the white collar class in the US

It's NOT just about programmers and IT people anymore. Name an office job, and you can probably find someone willing to do it remotely from West Asia at a heavy discount. Human Resources, payroll, document management, various analysis tasks including medical ones -- all are now being outsourced. For example, if you go to the hospital and have some xrays taken, there is a really good chance that they will send them (electronically) to West Asia, have a technician there examine them and send their analysis back to your hospital. Personally at my own workplace, I get calls several times per week from companies offering to take over various parts of our operations (I tell them no).

I think 'modest impact' is an extreme understatement.

Global labor unions for white collar workers are about the only way to stem this trend, IMHO.