More jobs moving offshore

More jobs moving offshore
3 mil jobs to be sent over decade

Kevin G. Hall
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Dec. 12, 2005 12:00 AM

WASHINGTON - The practice of transferring American jobs to lower-cost countries, called offshoring, is climbing the food chain. It's no longer just software programming and help desks that are being sent to India and elsewhere in Asia.

Fidelity National Financial of Jacksonville, Fla., is looking for tax processors in India. Intelliways, an Indian company that's working on behalf of a U.S. Internet firm, wants someone there to write news releases. India's Cactus Communications Pvt. Ltd. seeks someone in Asia to edit complex English-language research papers about topics in nuclear physics, astrophysics and particle physics for U.S. and other foreign clients.

You get the picture.

With more than 3 million jobs projected to be shipped overseas in the next decade, many analysts question what this means for future U.S. competitiveness.

"Any professional service that can be boiled down to predictable steps, even if they are complicated steps, is now exportable to south Asia," said Robert Reich, who was the secretary of labor in the Clinton administration. "We have to understand there is no longer any sharp distinction between manufacturing and services."

Jim Stachura came to the same conclusion when he was researching where to expand his technology company.

"Any profession that has a language of its own, where professionals from two entirely different cultures can share that work, is a candidate" for offshoring, said Stachura, research director of Aelera Corp., a technology-development firm in Alpharetta, Ga.

Aelera initially sought to expand into India but opted for lower-cost U.S. cities such as Savannah, Ga., and Olympia, Wash.

Broadly defined, the services sector today employs eight in 10 American workers. When global trade eroded U.S. manufacturing jobs in the 1980s and 1990s, experts said the U.S. economy was making the transition to a service economy. Now that sector doesn't feel so safe anymore.

"Labor has always been a commodity, but it has never been so fungible, so easy to move," said Clyde Prestowitz, director of Economic Strategy Institute, which challenges free-trade assumptions, and the author of the recent book Three Billion New Capitalists.

The book concludes that China and India threaten future U.S. job security. Increasingly, skilled professional jobs are being sent abroad, including some in architecture, accounting, law, publishing, finance and insurance.

When the American Institute of Architects surveyed its members last year, it said that 11 percent had shipped design work overseas and another 14 percent were considering it.

"I was a little bit surprised that it was that high; 25 percent had at least thought about it," said Kermit Baker, the institute's chief economist.

Of those who'd shipped work overseas, a quarter cited lower costs, another quarter cited faster production and 50 percent of the architectural firms polled said offshoring helped them cover peak demand. Most of it is computer-aided design work, traditionally done by junior architects.

Lawyers look for help abroad, too. A poll published Dec. 1 by American Lawyer magazine reported that 77 percent of the top 200 U.S. law firms use contract lawyers on a temporary basis, with 6 percent contracting to lawyers offshore.

"When I saw that, my eyes popped out," said Ron Friedmann, the president of Prism Legal Consulting, an Arlington, Va., company that guides law firms about technology issues, including offshoring. "Six percent is, to me, quite a bit when it was barely on the radar screen two years ago."