Offshoring the Middle Class

The use of the Internet to outsource American jobs is a classic example of this principle in action. The Internet was originally making it easier for American workers to perform various types of work. Now it threatens the very job once helped support. The Internet has become a new tool for business managers Americans who believe the low wages that are beneficial to their business, and should be the rule, not the exception. This philosophy is very much supported by Wall Street that stock prices tend to fall when the government report showed that wages rise. The argument is that high wages cause inflation and lower earnings.

In March 2004, the San Jose local news ran a story which estimates that one in six jobs in Silicon Valley are susceptible to offshoring. That figure is one of seven jobs to San Francisco, and one in ten jobs for the rest of the nation. Given that the jobs offshored higher than average pay, the total annual loss to the national economy could be in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Offshoring proponents claim that offshored jobs will be replaced with a comparable paying job, but they could not say where the jobs will come from. So far, the statistics show the software engineer replaced by offshore India has been having trouble finding a replacement job, whatever. According to the IEEE-USA, the United States wing of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the unemployment rate for electrical and electronics engineers rose in 2003 to a record 6.2 per cent, compared with 4.2 percent in 2002.