Offshoring the Economy

[unixronin]

A sobering article in Fast Company magazine says that as many as 14 million jobs in the US could be offshored.  It's not just IT any more.  It's accountants, customer service reps, medical transcriptionists.

"More than just outsourcing IT or anyone's job, we're outsourcing the American middle class," says Bronstein.

I find myself increasingly thinking it's time to abandon both this career and this country, and find some other way to make a living, somewhere else.  I just don't know what.  I still don't know if I could handle the schooling to become a pharmacist.  I'm seriously considering retail; I'm told Home Despot pays $16 an hour.  Our friends wolfspaw and stoda already abandoned IT to become massage therapists.  And frankly, I seriously think that the US economy is going to crash as a result of offshoring -- the ultimate manifestation of the shortsighted Wall Street quest for short-term profit.

A partial list of Fast Company's "at risk" jobs:

• Extreme risk:  Accountant, industrial engineer, production control specialist, quality assurance engineer, helpdesk specialist, telemarketer
• High or moderate risk:  Automotive engineer, computer systems analyst, database administrator, software developer, customer-service representative, CAD technician, paralegal/legal assistant, medical transcriptionist, copy editor, journalist, film editor, insurance agent, lab technician, human resources specialist
• Low risk:  Aircraft mechanic, artist, carpenter, civil engineer, headhunter, interior designer

We're not just offshoring jobs:  We're offshoring our economy.

Comments

[jilara.livejournal.com]

Actually, it's Cadence now, with the offshore problems, but Tibco had its own set of global issues. ;-)
But yes, all of the above, and overseas people who are engineers but don't know coding as well as I do. I have to do part of their work for them, because I understand our proprietary code better than they do. I'm also not the right caste. They ask for information from management, who doesn't know anything, and refuse to talk to mere engineers (or writers) at the end of the food chain because we aren't on the correct level of the org chart. (I really enjoyed when they blew off the VP, not knowing who he was, because he was backing my attempts to gain information from them for one of his projects. They've been much more humble since they were called on the carpet for that one!)