New job drain is emerging threat to U.S. workers

The drain of manufacturing jobs to off-shore sites has been of obvious concern for decades. Now a new threat is emerging with technical and service jobs being exported.
We wish we knew the answer to this job-drain problem. But we don't. Nobody does.
But we do know that government, industry and just plain folks better start talking about this issue and looking for answers before it's too late.
During the second half of the 21st century, the United States emerged as the greatest producer of goods in the world. And during that same half century, millions of jobs were exported. It started with toys and knickknacks, and quickly expanded into steel, textiles, clothes, automobiles, appliances, electronic equipment and durable goods of every kind.
And that drain continues.
By the numbers
Just last month, the U.S. economy lost 93,000 jobs. The Labor Department reported that 44,000 of those jobs were in manufacturing, the 37th straight month that sector has shed jobs.
But 28,000 of the lost jobs came from the business and professional sector, which includes some of the best-paying jobs in America. And many of those jobs were high-tech jobs, being shifted primarily to India and, increasingly, China.
Companies are finding that they can replace $60-an-hour software writers in the United States with Indian or Chinese software writers that cost about $6-an-hour.
China, a nation that enjoys a $100 billion per year balance of trade deficit with the United States and just last week rejected a U.S. suggestion that it should adjust the value of its currency against the dollar to more accurately reflect the reality of the world market, can be counted on to grab every software job it can snare.
The only thing limiting other nations from grabbing high-tech and customer service jobs is their ability to educate their potential workers in the sciences and English. Every new class that graduates represents a new threat to American jobs.
Wide possibilities
Not just customer service and software jobs are at stake. Engineering work, accounting and financial analysis, architecture and even legal research jobs are being exported.
And while India was the first large-scale importer of software jobs, and China has the greatest long-term potential, they are by no means the only threats. Russia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and the Czech Republic are among the countries that are already providing low-cost technical workers for U.S. companies.
In a world economy, there are no easy answers to this kind of competition. But the United States can hardly sit back and watch its service and technical workforce shrink the way its manufacturing work force has. And the first thing Congress should do is check the tax code to make sure that our own government isn't subsidizing the job drain by giving tax breaks to companies that move operations overseas.