More on Offshore Outsourcing

With the American economy finally gathering steam but job growth lagging, the offshoring of U.S. tech and service jobs has challenged the economic futures of white-collar workers and stirred the globalization debate like never before.

On one side are American workers in Silicon Valley and elsewhere who feel anger, fear and profound uncertainty as white-collar tech jobs quickly move to lower-cost countries like India, China and the Philippines. Offshoring has sparked a small backlash of grass-roots protests from New York to California and spurred protectionist legislation in eight states. The issue promises to become a hot-button election-year topic if job growth - shown Friday to be rebounding - doesn't come back quickly enough.

On the other side are business executives and economists who argue that the offshoring of jobs is unstoppable and ultimately healthy for the United States, spurring this country to shed certain jobs and create more sophisticated ones in order to stay atop the ladder of innovation. The shift of tech work overseas is just the latest chapter in decades of globalization, they argue.

"I think overall, long term, the U.S. economy can take it. But there's going to be a huge amount of restructuring pain," said Rafiq Dossani, senior research scholar at Stanford University and co-author of a major offshoring study.

Such forecasts are of little comfort to the tens of thousands of tech workers - many of them in the valley - who have already seen their companies create jobs in India, China and other countries even as they lay off workers here.
In fact, India's National Association of Software and Service Companies, the country's largest technology trade group, offers up numerous studies to U.S. lawmakers arguing that offshoring is a "win-win" practice for both India and the United States, saving U.S. companies more money to reinvest at home than if they hadn't moved employees to India.

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