48,000 US jobs shifted in Jan-Mar

More than 48,000 American jobs were shifted overseas, including to countries like India and China, in the January-March quarter this fiscal, according to a new report.

Of the documented jobs that left the United States for other countries in January through March 2004, 23,396 went to Mexico, 8,283 to China, 3,895 to India, 4,419 to other Asian countries, 5,511 to Latin American countries other than Mexico and 2,933 to other countries, the report by the universities of Cornell and Massachusetts-Amherst said.

The US Midwest lost the most jobs to outsourcing (18,968) from January through March 2004. Other US regions that lost a lot of jobs were the Southeast (8,604) and Northeast (7,223).

The states hardest hit were Illinois (7,555 jobs lost) and Michigan (5,283 jobs lost).

Unionised jobs accounted for a disproportionate 39 per cent of the US jobs that moved to other countries during the time period studied. In addition, 29 per cent of the companies shifting production out of the United States were unionised, the report showed.

From January through March 2004, there were 69 production shifts from the US to Mexico as compared with 30 during the same period in 2001; 58 shifts to China as compared with 25 shifts in January-March 2001; and 31 shifts to India as compared with one shift in January-March 2001.

The companies shifting jobs to China tend to be large, publicly held, highly profitable and well established, with 72 per cent of them owned by US multinationals.

The report by two labour experts at Cornell University and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, obtained their information through online tracking of media reports, corporate research and creation of a database of information on all production shifts announced or confirmed in the media.

Their report was commissioned by US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which sought the information because there is no government-mandated reporting system to track production shifts from the US to other countries.

The authours believe their methodology only captures one-third of all production shifts in most cases, which, if true, would bring actual number of jobs lost to outsourcing in 2004 to 406,000 by year's end, compared with 204,000 in 2001.

"We know we're not capturing all the numbers because companies are wary about the negative publicity and often don't share it fully with reporters," said Kate

Bronfenbrenner, Director of Labour Education Research at Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations and co-author of the study, along with Stephanie Luce, Research Director and Assistant Professor at U.Mass.-Amherst.

The researchers, who also studied US job outsourcing from October 2000 through April 2001 for a predecessor commission of the bipartisan Congressional group, saw these important differences in their new 2004 study.

Unlike in 2001, when majority of job shifts were to single destinations, this year shifts are to multiple destinations

simultaneously, some from the US to 'near shore' or close to home, such as Mexico and Latin America, and some to off- shore or far away, such as China and other countries in Asia.

Also, unlike 2001, white-collar service jobs, particularly ones involving IT and call centers, are being shifted from the US and Great Britain to India.