[Excerpt]

The House voted Tuesday to make employer-friendly changes to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, including adding two members to a violations review commission, increasing its power, extending deadlines for companies to challenge citations and allowing more of them to recoup lawyers' fees.

Republicans said the four bills would enhance OSHA's oversight of employers and improve the regulatory process.

Democrats said the legislation was an election-year gift to big business, intended to weaken regulation that ultimately would hurt workers.

"Don't hamstring small businesses' ability to continue to hire new workers and compete in our economy," said GOP Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee. "That's why these bills are important."

Republicans argued the four bills make technical, easily understood changes that remove unnecessary red tape on employers by OSHA, a Labor Department agency.

"I would argue the bills enhance OSHA's ability to work with employers in a voluntary way to increase the health and safety of workers," Boehner said.

Democrats countered that the bills do nothing to improve job protections for workers, and Republicans are looking out only for their employer campaign contributors.

"You never get any bills from them seeking to protect workers," Rep. Major Owens, D-N.Y., said about the Republicans.

4:49:48 PM    comment []

[Excerpt]

U.S. corporations are sending work overseas faster than previously thought, according to Forrester Research Inc., whose controversial report 18 months ago helped stoke the national controversy over offshoring American jobs.

In its latest study, Forrester predicts that by the end of next year, U.S. firms will offshore more than 800,000 service jobs, 40 percent more than the firm estimated previously. Forrester's overall estimate remains the same: The firm predicts that about 3.3 million jobs will go overseas by 2015.

The Cambridge, Mass., researcher said the largest U.S. employers are expanding the types of work they send overseas. Where telemarketers and software developers used to bear the brunt of the job loss, bank loan processors, insurance claims adjusters and even legal assistants now share the pain.

Critics of offshoring seized on the original Forrester report as evidence that shipping jobs overseas would devastate service-sector employment and the middle-class workers who fill those occupations. Yet the report itself was criticized by economists, company executives and others who have defended offshoring as a painful but necessary result of a global economy.

The issue has become a political hot button, with some in Congress calling for laws to limit the type of work that can besent abroad and privacy advocates saying the practice puts sensitive data into the hands of overseas firms.

Despite the criticism, the largest U.S. companies are accelerating their offshoring plans, and by 2008, more than half the Fortune 1000 will have overseas operations, according to the report.

4:41:07 PM    comment []