Friday, April 02, 2004

If you're going to call an article "U.S. Receiving More 'Outsourced' Jobs Than It's Losing," the least you can do is offer some kind of concrete, non-anecdotal evidence that that's the case. This doesn't count:

While reliable figures aren't available for the last two years, the Commerce Department estimated on March 18 that the number of Americans employed by U.S. affiliates of majority non-U.S. companies grew by 4.7 million from 1997 through 2001. In the same period, the number of non-Americans working at affiliates of majority-U.S. companies abroad rose by 2.8 million.

This doesn't say anything about outsourcing or "insourcing" -- or, rather, it lumps in-/outsourcing together with changes in employment by U.S. affiliates of foreign companies. If (Japanese-owned) Columbia Pictures added staff in California in that time period (a period of economic boom, by the way), those new workers got counted in that 4.7 million. Do you consider that analogous to a U.S.-owned firm shipping call-center jobs to Bangalore?

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