Gone in the blink of an eye
Berkeley researchers declare 14 million U.S. jobs are at risk of being outsourced.
Salon.com (*requires registration)
By Katharine Mieszkowski
Nov. 5, 2003
If every white-collar job that could be easily outsourced to Russia, China and India goes the way of the customer-service call center, 14 million positions will be eliminated in the United States, according to "The New Wave of Outsourcing," an academic study released in late October.
RESEARCHERS ASHOK DEO BARDHAN AND CYNTHIA A. KROLL AT THE FISHER CENTER FOR REAL ESTATE AND URBAN ECONOMICS AT UC-BERKELEY'S HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS calculated that some 11 percent of all U.S. occupations are "vulnerable" to outsourcing.
While Bardhan and Kroll stress that this figure represents the "outer limit" of how many white-collar jobs could soon migrate from the United States, their research also notes just how easy it is to relocate operations that require little infrastructure. The incentive to do so is huge: An American computer programmer is paid, on average, $60,000 to $80,000, while a coder in India makes $5,880 to $11,000.
The report highlights in bright color two pressing questions. In this century, will Silicon Valley become the faded symbol of a race-to-the-bottom global job market in the same way that Flint, Mich., and its fading car-manufacturing factories did in the last? Or, will globalization bring new opportunities to developing economies that desperately need them? Salon spoke with Bardhan on the phone from his office in Berkeley, Calif., about the implications that outsourcing has for the U.S. labor market and the world....
Source: UC Berkeley in the News
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