Guest Author - J. Lynn
If you have worked in the IT field for any length of time, you have likely seen the increased flow of contracted workers that are citizens of other nations. The vast majority of contracted IT workers are from India, but they don’t have to leave their country to find an American job.
Washington policy makers have been embroiled in conflicting debate over Outsourcing workers since the Bush Administration took office. Global Insight, a private consulting firm reasons that outsourcing added $33.6 billion to U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) in 2003 and will bring $124.2 billion through 2008.
Other benefits to outsourcing, from the Global Insight report, are that Outsourcing increases the average wage of American workers. However, no one can deny that Outsourcing takes job that US IT workers would have to others that are not US citizens. They recommend that the government provide additional training and economic assistance to these displaced workers. Personally, I have yet to meet an IT worker that would rather sit at home on less than 1/5 of their regular salary and attend additionally training for jobs they may already be qualified for that will go to someone else. What purpose is additional training if their jobs for that training are in another country?
It seems to me that our government is having difficulty caring for its own citizens, preferring to err on the side of corporate convenience and profit to reduce corporate welfare.
Between 01/01/2000 to 03/18/2005 the number of offshore IT jobs has climbed steadily to more than 350,000 with a loss of 172,000 US IT jobs. The human face of outsourcing is that while it may benefit some, it does not benefit most. Outsourcing leads to unemployment at home which has far reaching ripple effects adding to the shrinking of Social Security and other government programs that rely on US employee tax dollars.
IT jobs are not alone in the risk to being outsourced. Other careers are also at risk, like medical transcription services, customer-service call centers, and a variety of accounting and research positions.
US workers will have to ban together to make themselves less disposable and get an edge on the increasing outsourcing drive by becoming better educated and advantageous to employ and corporations will have to start seeing the local aspect to their dollar savings at the expense of the American worker. Until then, the government needs to hear your views on this issue.
