> According to the widely cited Forrester estimates, 3.3 million U.S.
> jobs will be "offshored" over the next decade, in an economy with 130
> million jobs now, that the BLS projects will add 22 million more by
> 2010 (though it's doing a pretty crummy job of it now). 3.3 million is
> a lot bigger than zero, but it's hardly the dominant force in the
> labor market that Roach portrays it. This explanation overlooks the
> fact that employers were severely burned by the bursting of the
> bubble, and are very reluctant to hire and invest. Or, looked at
> another way, the offshoring phenom is itself part of working through
> the post-bubble slump. Japanese employment didn't grow in the 90s
> either.
But off-shoring can be a considerable worry in some segments of the labor market.
U.S. freelance translators are starting to get a little nervous, especially in some language pairs like Spanish-English, where competition from low-wage countries is quite feasible, and since only words are being exchanged, the Internet throws everyone in the world into competition with each other. "Off-shoring" is hardly a relevant term. Thus the Board of Directors of the American Translators Association is pushing a rather rickety "certification program," claiming that it will make translators look more like lawyers or doctors, in order (I suspect) to convince potential clients that its members are more qualified than someone in Paraguay or India.
In general, the worry seems to be that really high-income, highly educated Americans are being undercut, and eventually only fast food workers and hotel maids (most of them immigrants, of course) will be left employed. Highly exaggerated, of course, but when peoples' fears take over, that's the kind of talk that you hear.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A gentleman haranguing on the perfection of our law, and that it was equally open to the poor and the rich, was answered by another, 'So is the London Tavern.' -- "Tom Paine's Jests..." (1794); also attr. to John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) by Hazlitt