Outsourcing: a Policy Agenda

Outsourcing: A policy Agenda This article is about outsourcing jobs such as auto and apparel to places like Mexico and China in which people believed was okay because, “they’ll get better jobs.” But U.S. companies have been sending a wide variety of service jobs such as computer programming to India and other lower wage nations which has become a big concern. The “outsourcing” of jobs has become a trend to try and save money. Forrester Research estimates about 40 percent of Fortune 1,000 firms have already outsourced work and another 3 million service jobs by 2015 will leave the United States. It is said that a small amount of jobs are lost so far but these layoffs have a huge impact on the communities. “The University of California did a study and estimates that 14 million U.S. jobs are vulnerable of being outsourced.” U.S. companies make up about 70 percent of the global outsourcing market. India is the top destination in the developing world because domestic subcontractors perform a range of services for the United States market. Low-skilled workers in India earn $1 or less an hour to handle customer service calls and higher-skilled workers like computer programmers earn about one-tenth the pay of their U.S. counterparts. Even at low wages Indian workers are eager to accept these jobs because they fear the opportunity to work will disappear once lower costs are found elsewhere. China is the second biggest developing country because of the cheap labor and no unions. They’re only problem compared to India is the English-speaking advantage but, they’re working on that in Beijing by promoting English language education. China has experience over Mexico in manufacturing jobs. And even though Mexico’s export zone doubling after NAFTA in 1994 they still lost several hundred thousand jobs to lower-wage China. India even lost some foreign manufacturing jobs to China. State and Federal legislators introduced bills to stop outsourcing; basically