An interesting press release from the AFL-CIO yesterday on outsourcing. It cites a new study commissioned by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission. The report was written by Kate Bronfenbrenner of Cornell and Stephanie Luce of U Mass. I haven’t read anything of Luce’s that I recall, but Bronfenbrenner is not exactly what I’d call a disinterested observer – although I do respect her research, especially on union organizing campaign strategies. I haven’t had a chance to read the report carefully (it’s about 100 pages long – here is a link to the .pdf copy of the whole thing) but the juicy bits from the executive summary include: 1. Announcements or “confirmations” of shifts in the first quarter of 2004 amounted to nearly 50,000 jobs. They then factor in a multiplier (based on “estimates that media tracking captures” only 2/3 of shifts to mexico and 1/3 of shifts to China) and multiply it by four to come up with an estimate of about 406,000 jobs “offshored” this year. This begs the question how you determine what the “real” number of offshored jobs is that the media reports fail to capture, and I’ll read that section with interest. 2. They note the trend of sending work to more than one offshore facility (perhaps to justify their claim that media reports don’t fully capture all the jobs offshored). 3. BLS statistics underestimated the number of offshored jobs by around 20,000 – that is a pretty self-serving claim that I’ll also be interested to investigate. 4. Unionized employers are disproportionately impacted by offshoring. That I definitely believe. I hope to get a chance to read this more carefully over the weekend and post additional comments.
