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]

Yeah, that's the problem. Everyone is "addicted to eating and paying their mortgage," as I've heard folks say.

I know that's why I keep at it. That and being able to help out underemployed friends who had trouble keeping a roof over their heads. I'm plotting my exit to my next career, for when I pay off some stuff, a few years down the road. 25+ years in this field, constantly pulling other people's chestnuts out of the fire, is finally getting to me. (My problem is I still care. I still need to believe in what I do, which is bad for my ulcer.) I've been up and down with tech, and mostly underpaid, but that same factor has kept me employed, ironically. But it's an ultimately abusive line of work, and it seems like it's getting more and more that way.

I had the common sense to ditch the high-paying wretched.com job that was making me crazy, at the height of the boom, and go back to nuts-and-bolts tech, down in the firmware where I started. "But you're giving up all this money" people said. Yeah, but at what cost? Sanity? Those guys were bottom-line slavedrivers. But it made me aware of how corporate types think...