Offshoring an engineer's job improves the bottomline for the US owned company. In order for it to enhance the US economy in a way that would create a replacement domestic job, does it require some minimum percent of the increased profit be funnelled into job retraining and education for it not to be a net negative on the economy?
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are we in danger of losing IT jobs overseas in a way that negatively impacts our economy? Or is free trade and job migration still always a good thing even if sometimes painful to individuals?
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There does not appear to be broad consensus on the impact of offshoring on the economy. Others can skillfully detail the economics of the matter. I'm going to focus on the primary assumption informing your question - that *job-retraining* is in any way (whether funded or not) a counter-balance to job loss via offshoring.
As you know, corporations are offshoring a variety of job functions because they can get the same labor which costs them X domestically for x divided by two or three or more.
Since this is the driver and skilled, professional-level labor is now available in a number of low-cost locales, there is zero incentive (other than for appearances sake) for owners to funnel any capital into re-training of displaced workers.
There is a more fundamental problem.
Even if re-training was well funded and supported, what similarly lucrative jobs would displaced professional workers find which could not also in turn be re-located?
Nearly all process and professional labor can be offshored - everything from insurance claims processing through financial anaylsis and into the more familiar IT activities. If it can be done in front of a computer and doesn't require a person to be on-hand, it can be offshored.
This fact limits the usefulness of re-training since those job categories which are *offshore-proof* (so to speak) may not provide comparable income and may not be able to absorb the numbers of displaced workers produced by the offshoring phenomena.
It appears then, that the end result of offshoring is the creation of yet another cohort of permanently adrift workers whose skillsets, while still very much in-demand, are no longer required domestically because of the existence of cheaper labor linked to owners via the Internet.
So, as usual *free trade* and *job migration* creates the greatest benefit for those holding the reins and the least for those holding the bag.
DRM