Offshoring Costing Jobs?
There's an article in today's Dayton (OH) Daily News written by Cox Publishing staffer Marilyn Geewax quoting the Government Accountability Office (GAO) says that there is no evidence that the practice of offshoring (U.S. companies hiring foreign companies to handle jobs like call centers and even computer programming and engineering) directly impacting the job market in America.
This is, of course, a statistical analysis. News media outlets prefer anecdotal stories of people who have lost their jobs to overseas workers and companies. So readers are often left with evidence far too short on facts.
I think that we can have all the "wailing and gnashing of teeth" that people want to do--especially if it makes for good editorial fodder, but that it does no good. There are too many forces at work here. First, internationalization is a fact. It will continue unless, or until, some global disruption--say the success of Islamic reactionaries who would like to return society to the Middle Ages for example--causes the complete collapse of the entire world economic order and we all return to being hunter/gatherers.
A second force is the change in work. This is a huge challenge for people in developed countries. It's the reality of what Peter Drucker, and others, have been talking about for 40 years--the rise of "knowledge workers." The number of people who work with their hands required for our economy is shrinking as a proportion of our entire workforce. For example, we don't need as many unskilled laborers in manufacturing thanks to automation, but we do need skilled technicians. The same is true in other areas. So the challenge for society is to constantly raise the knowledge of its people so that they can do the new knowledge jobs. The decline of unskilled jobs will continue unabated (unless the previously mentioned global disruption occurs.
I put the challenge on leaders (business not political) to continually upgrade their organizations rather than taking the short-sighted approach of trying to do the same thing cheaper. That is always a recipe for long-term failure.
6:09:11 AM 
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