On Mon, 19 Jan 2004, Dwayne Monroe wrote:
> The non-manufacturing offshore outsourcing story has gone from relative
> obscurity to media prominence. Is it too early yet for firm numbers on
> what effect (if any) this is having upon *jobless recovery*?
It doesn't seem like much based on the figures in this article:
> At IBM headquarters in Armonk, N.Y., a spokesman said that the company
> expects to shift 3,000 U.S. jobs overseas this year.
3,000 in a year. That's 250 jobs each month. It'll take an awful lot of that to account for 300,000 jobs that are conservatively estimated to have gone missing each month to make this recovery jobless.
> He declined to comment on plans for next year. He said IBM expects to
> add 15,000 jobs world-wide this year, with a net total of 5,000 of them
> in the U.S.
In other words, they expect to add more jobs in the US (5,000) than they take away, which makes the whole idea of losing jobs seem a little shaky. The 10,000 that are added overseas might be counted as jobs that would have gone here, but maybe not -- they could be counted as part of IBM's global expansion into expanding markets overseas. But even if you counted them all as shifted jobs, you're still only be talking 800 a month. It still seems like spit in the ocean compared to 300,000.
And the IBM story seems to be portrayed as a relatively huge occurrence of offshoring.
Michael