Offshoring Tracker Launched
U.S. Companies Have Already Exported More than 165,000 Jobs
Seattle, Wash The Washington Alliance of Technology Workers launched a Web-based tracker Thursday that displays the mounting number of jobs U.S. companies send overseas.
The tracker will include a total of jobs sent offshore by date, and the specific offshoring events related to the company that exported the jobs.
The [Offshoring Tracker] is a joint effort by WashTech and the Communications Workers of America to account for the number of U.S. job that are outsource offshore. Such information is difficult to determine, since companies are not required to report how many jobs they send to foreign workers.
In fact, most of the companies sending jobs to other countries work deliberately keep their activities from becoming known by the public, said CWA Research Economist Tony Daley.
Daley says the tracker's totals probably represent only a small portion of the actual number of jobs sent offshore, which he estimates to be less than 20 percent.
"The tracker identifies only a small portion of the amount of offshore outsourcing going on in this country. It's not perfect. It reflects what is reported in the media, and the media doesn't capture everything."
"We know we're seriously undercounting-but it's a count," said Daley. "Nobody else is counting. And there is a conspiracy on the other side to not count at all."
Daley said he has found evidence that outsourcing companies are compelling employees and their outsourcing vendors signing to sign non-disclosure agreements. As a consequence, determining the extent of offshoring activity by companies is very difficult, if not impossible.
"I find it outrageous," said Daley. "Companies are hoodwinking their clients, their customers, and their shareholders by not divulging this, all because they are afraid of public reaction."
WashTech President Marcus Courtney said that the tracker's numbers initially will be updated a few times each month. But the updates could happen more frequently should reporting methods improve.
Courtney said tracker watchers can help update the site by reporting instances of offshoring to WashTech. They can submit names of companies currently not on the list, and after WashTech and CWA verifies the offshoring event and determines the numbers of jobs sent offshore, the information will be included in the tracker's running totals.
It was tech workers, in fact, who prompted him to develop the tracker, Courtney said.
"We created the tracker after getting hundreds of e-mails requesting such a feature," he said.
Courtney said the idea began to come together after viewing an "Exporting America" segment on CNNs Lou Dobbs Tonight. Lou Dobbs has compiled a list of U.S. companies that send jobs offshore, but it doesn't track the number of those jobs, he said.
In the future, Daley said there is much that he intents to eventually include in the study.
"We haven't yet been able to adequately cover the offshoring activity in 2001, and there was a lot of activity then," he said. "We have only been able to do research on about half of the Lou Dobbs list, and they add more company names (to the list) nearly every day."
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, information services was the only sector that continued to shed jobs last month.
"This tracker helps prove that our leading tech companies are creating jobs, but just not in this country," said Courtney.
The offshore tracker will be hosted at <http://www.techsunite.org/offshore>.
TechsUnite is a project of WashTech and the Communications Workers of America.