Is Offshoring Good? [Full-text]

As we can see with the explosive development of offshoring this is not turning out to be the case. We not only have to look at the number of jobs getting created in the macro economy but what kind of jobs. Obviously we make distinctions around jobs. We value computer jobs at a higher-level than fast food jobs. The economy in the U.S. is creating many more fast food jobs than high-end computer jobs. No one can point to what a person should be re-skilled at. If you computer programmers lose their jobs, what should they retrain for? Will employers high them once they are retrained.

I hear the retraining theory all the time but never hear much about the realities of how that is supposed to work.

Soota: To say that "if the current trends continue, the US will soon be running a trade deficit in its service category" is not based on facts. The US is the world's No. 1 exporter of services (per WTO/Dept of Commerce report 2005) at $318 billion with 15% share of the world services market. The next largest is UK with 8% share. Indian share of the overall service market (of which programming is a part) is a paltry 1.9%. That HUGE gap is not going to go away soon as feared by you.

On the re-skill issue, I must share with you what happened to computer manufacturing in India when the market was opened up to global competition. Most manufacturers had to shut shop and were replaced by IBM, Dell, Compaq and HP. What happened to the people in India who used to manufacture computers? Some re-skilled themselves, some changed professions and some I am sure, were left behind. The onus to learn and add new value is a global imperative.

Courtney: As a percentage of our U.S. gross domestic product--which is what I was referring to--we will be moving from a trade surplus to deficit. We could still be importing more services than we are exporting and be the world's largest service exporter.

Globalization requires that we have social imperatives outside of market forces. If the onus is to constantly update and re-skill, then we should have social policies around that imperative. We have to look at other values such as fairness, who is really winning, losing and why.

As you point out opening markets up for competition in India created more opportunity for large multinational corporations and they became the winners and domestic producers became the losers. We cannot have globalization and trade where the only winners are the large multinational corporations and the market. Workers, labor rights, communities and the environment should be on an equal playing field as the market in the discussion around globalization.