Outsourcing in America

Outsourcing is weakening the nation’s job-creation engine, and leaving thousands of newly unemployed workers here in the United States in search of work. With the number of companies outsourcing jobs continually increasing, it becomes a much larger issue for the U.S. workforce to find a job when so many are being outsourced overseas. Unfortunately this trend is likely to continue to cause serious harm in the United States if it continues to go unmonitored. Foreign and American governments have contributed to the problems caused by outsourcing in a number of ways. Some of the more visible ways are a lack of monitoring and data gathering, ceasing to enforce any pressure or penalties upon companies outsourcing jobs, and U.S. jobs being outsourced due to foreign incentives. These three issues are a large contributing factor to the current problem of outsourcing in the United States and its negative impact on the American workforce.

The U.S. federal and state governments are contributing to the problems created by outsourcing due to their lack of monitoring and data gathering on the number of jobs that are being exported. Without having the needed statistics on the number of jobs that are being exported, the full impact of job loss cannot be properly quantified. The U.S. Commerce and Labor Departments claim that the lack of monitoring system to record the number of outsourced jobs in America is due to a lack of resources. This thought process seems contradictory as the federal government spends over $130 billion each year on research and development, and a fraction of this spending would be enough to grasp the full scale of this outsourcing issue (52). This prevents any meaningful understanding for the U.S. people on the scale of jobs being outsourced, the business’s and occupations being affected by outsourcing, and the economy’s potential responses to the negative impacts of outsourcing. With the absence of this data, corporations are able to continue concealing