There's a lot of talk these days about the "offshoring" of jobs. For example, here is a recent press release from Global Trade Watch:
“Offshoring” is the term businesses coined to describe their practice of sending work now performed in the United States to other countries.
“For many years, white-collar workers have watched as blue-collar workers’ jobs have been shipped to China and Mexico,” said Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers. “Now it is white-collar workers whose jobs are being targeted for offshoring. Pennsylvania workers need to wake up and join together to demand concrete solutions from our presidential candidates before their only option is a job at Wal-Mart.”
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A surprising array of jobs are at risk of offshoring, not just computer programmers and call centers, but actuaries and accountants, editors and writers, drafters and graphic designers, underwriters and financial analysts, even scientists and mathematicians. Most jobs done in front of a computer are vulnerable to offshoring.
Global Trade Watch has more about its offshoring concerns here. The core of the issue seems to be that when the U.S. trades with other countries, some jobs done by Americans are shifted abroad to be done by non-Americans. (Countries other than the U.S. also have these same concerns about their own jobs, of course.)
Now, there may be situations here and there in which foreign competition is not a concern (e.g., if a small country that does not produce cars imposes a tariff on car imports, it will not be protecting domestic jobs from going overseas because there is no domestic industry). But for a large economy like the United States, which produces just about everything, it seems likely that there will almost always be both a domestic industry and foreign competition. This leads me to some questions. How far would groups like Global Trade Watch go in preventing offshoring or reversing current offshoring? If they could, would they want to stop all imports that compete with domestic producers? Is there some amount of offshoring that is acceptable? Or should we allow imports only where there is no domestic industry?
I have read some of their materials, but I don't have a good sense of what kind of trade policy they would like to see in this regard.
