Corporations Will Ship 2.4 Million High-Tech and Professional Jobs Overseas by 2015

by Tula Connell, Feb 26, 2007

We’ve noted often how trade policies, fiscal polices and other mismanagement by the Bush administration have led to an increase in family-supporting U.S. jobs being shipped overseas—and how those jobs more and more are hitting middle-class workers in the professional and technical sectors. (Check out a few recent posts here, here and here.)

A new report from the Brookings Institution puts some fresh numbers on the rate of corporate job exporting. According to today’s Bureau of National Affairs Daily Labor Report (subscription required):

Growth in the offshoring of information technology, business office, and other service-providing occupations will cause the loss of an estimated 2.4 million jobs in some 250 U.S. cities between 2004 and 2015, according to a report by the Brookings Institution.

The offshoring of service jobs, including ones held by college-educated professionals who previously thought their jobs were immune to foreign competition, has “created a new source of job insecurity,” and the movement of work to other countries is expected to grow over the coming decade, especially in information services and “back-office” services, the study said.

The Implications of Service Offshoring for Metropolitan Economies finds that metropolitan areas with large concentrations of information technology service jobs or back-office jobs are generally more vulnerable to service offshoring than other metropolitan areas.

Further, 28 metropolitan areas, with 13.5 percent of the nation’s population, are likely to lose between 2.6 and 4.3 percent of their jobs to service offshoring, higher than the average loss among the metropolitan areas studied.

Between 2004 and 2015, service offshoring is likely to cause the loss of 2.6 percent of jobs in metropolitan areas that specialize in information technology services and 2.4 percent of jobs in metropolitan areas that specialize in back-office services but only 1.9 percent of jobs in other metropolitan areas.

At least 17 percent of computer programming, software engineering and data entry jobs are likely to be offshored in particular metropolitan areas. The study concluded that offshoring of services to low-wage countries by the private sector is projected to expand over the coming decade, in part because of competitive pressures to reduce costs.

The most vulnerable metropolitan areas—which include Boston, Washington, D.C., Minneapolis, Dallas, San Francisco, Seattle and other major cities—have higher proportions of residents employed in computer programming, software engineering, accounting, telemarketing and other occupations that are highly susceptible to being offshored.

The study presumed no governmental services would be outsourced—but why make that presumption when the Bush administration already has moved so many federal jobs into the private sector—one more step closer to shipping them overseas.

Print This Article | E-Mail This Article |Comments (2)