Labor Union Attempts To Measure Offshoring's Impact On U.S. Jobs

CIO - The discuss over offshore outsourcing waste full of sound and fury, but what it has always lacked is significant data. Who is offshoring jobs? What functions are going abroad? Is offshore outsourcing replacing U.S. jobs or supplementing them?

Stepping in to expand that void, the AFL-CIO and its associate of non-union supporters, Working America, not long ago introduced Job Tracker , an online database that the AFL-CIO says illustrates the effect of offshoring on American towns and cities.

"Corporations who have taken value of messy traffic policies in America and abroad will no longer be able to conseal at the back the veils of bureaucracy," Karen Nussbaum, senior manager director of Working America, mentioned in a press let go announcing the Job Tracker tool.

The database contains data on more than 400,000 corporations, according to the AFL-CIO. But, as with any tool, it's usually as utilitarian as the data at the back it.

The AFL-CIO says the database incorporates data "from dozens of open sources," but the data many applicable to those meddlesome in offshoring comes from two U.S. Department of Labor sources: Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) archives and Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act notices.

The TAA program, determined in 1974, provides assist to workers who remove their jobs or whose hours of work and salary are marked down as a outcome of increased imports. It frequency relates to service jobs similar to data technology. WARN, enacted in 1988, requires employers to give employees with 60 days observe before shutting a plant or conducting a pile layoff (defined as more than 500 people or one-third of staff at a singular site). WARN notices were written to follow the pile production layoffs receiving place in the 1980s.

The turning point for both programs, as the AFL-CIO and Working America note in their confidante report, "Outsourced," is so high that many offshoring-related layoffs would not be represented in the figures. Indeed, in 2003 the Government Accountability Office found that usually a entertain of pile layoffs and plant closings were covered by the WARN Act.

"Many companies will prevent stating beneath WARN by buyouts, transfers and early retirements, so that the job losses technically are not layoffs," says Susan Houseman, senior economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. "It may be tough to obtain TAA certification-proving the pile layoff was due to trade."

A couple of rapid searches on Job Tracker of heading vendors in the U.S. IT services industry, reveals the burden of pinning down exact numbers.

For example, a finding of the Armonk, New York area, where IBM Global Services is headquartered, reveals that IBM as a entire "has been reported to be exporting jobs or to have laid off workers due to trade" (a TAA data point) and had laid off a complete of 657 workers at 6 well-defined sites in 2009 (WARN data). However, according to a 2009 New York Times ( NYT ) article, Big Blue had obviously laid off upwards of 4,600 employees that year.

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