As economy gains, outsourcing surges
First in a series
Boston Globe
By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff
11/2/2003
Manila -- To hear how far and deep the outsourcing of American jobs has traveled, listen to Christian Mancenon in barely accented English take an order over the phone for HBO from a man in Lebanon, Ill. "I'm showing here that you love movies," the 25-year-old Filipino said, while looking at his computer screen in a low-rise building in Makati, Manila's business district. Mancenon and 600 others work for a subsidiary of Philippines Long Distance Telephone Co. that fields customer calls for Dish Network satellite TV of Littleton, Colo....
The spread of outsourcing, beyond hard-hit technology workers, is a big reason the US economic recovery so far is a jobless one, and has stayed that way much longer than in previous upturns. A study released recently from the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY says the country lost more than 1 million white-collar jobs in the 1990s and "hundreds of thousands more since the turn of the century."
Precise data are hard to come by and estimates vary widely, but the UC study says that outsourcing is accelerating. "If you simultaneously read Indian newspapers and US newspapers, you're going to get a good correlation between layoffs here and jobs being created there," said ASHOK DEO BARDHAN, A [UC BERKELEY] RESEARCHER FOR THE STUDY. He added that as many as 30,000 jobs were lost to India alone in June, and that 14 million US service jobs are vulnerable....
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