Ronil Hira is an assistant professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. A former engineer, he's also chair of the workforce policy committee at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), one of the largest professional societies in the world. In recent months, he's distinguished himself as an eloquent speaker on the offshoring issue, one whose opinions aren't easily thrown into one political bucket or another. In a talk with Fast Company's Jennifer Reingold, he sounds off on the human costs of offshoring.

Fast Company: Is offshoring a good thing or a bad thing? Or is that too simplistic of a question?

Ronil Hira: I'm not against offshoring. I hope that this could be something that transforms and brings lots of people into the modern world. That's within our national interest, but at the same time, I don't think the way it's being done is responsible. Companies are going to do this because it's within their interest. In certain ways it's fine, but if they don't address the negative impacts, they're not being honest. The [real] question is how to mitigate the bad sides of offshoring. The people who say it's all good are those that have a lot of influence and power and haven't done their jobs.

FC: There have been wildly varying numbers on the potential job losses from offshoring. Some people think the coming retirement of the baby boomers will make the whole debate pointless, while others have talked about millions of jobs leaving our shores forever. Where do you fall on the spectrum?

Hira: People are being displaced. This is the absolute worst employment situation for tech workers ever. The reality is that those jobs may not be going at a 1:1 ratio, but many are being destroyed and will never come back in the U.S. The question is, what do you do with the idle human capital here?

FC: Has anyone offered a workable solution?

Hira: One of the problems is that companies are very secretive. I just don't know what companies are doing because they're not willing to speak out publicly. Some leaked IBM documents created a potential backlash since it came out that they were forcing employees through carrot and stick approaches to train their foreign replacements. It's a pretty humiliating experience. If they could be redeployed, they would quit and not worry about severance. You sometimes [hear people] saying that employees need more education, retraining, and such on a superficial level. No one really says "How does this really work?" How do you retrain an engineer to become a nurse? Someone who's 45 years old, with a master's, how realistic is that?