To: Bill Jackson who wrote (1440 ) 2/10/2004 2:29:10 PM From: Lizzie Tudor Read Replies (1) | Respond to from the Roach editorial,I have been criticized for exaggerating the potential impact of this cross-border arbitrage on current US hiring trends. Right now, the metrics are fuzzy, at best. The benchmark estimate of white collar offshoring comes from the IT research firm, Forrester, who calculates that “only” 3.3 million US business processing jobs will shift offshore by 2015. Like all estimates of IT-enabled transformations in the real economy, this one could also be well short of the mark. The details of the just-released January payroll employment survey hint at just such a possibility: Job losses were evident in a host of service sector categories that are prime candidates for offshoring — namely, accounting and bookkeeping (-18,000), business support services (-8,000), architects and engineers (-2,500), legal services (-800), and computer systems design (-600). For these areas, combined, US headcount is essentially unchanged over the past 12 months. At the same time, our calculations suggest that payrolls in America’s IT and information services segment are currently running about 350,000 below the profile of the recovery of the early 1990s — not exactly what would normally be expected of an increasingly IT-intensive US economy. Halfway around the world, anecdotal reports abound of surging employment in India’s IT-enabled export sector. In my view, these two seemingly disparate trends in America and India are not a coincidence — they are part and parcel of the same global labor arbitrage.
