http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/4332783.htm
   Mercury News | 10/21/2002 | Slowdown sending tech jobs overseas

  "By Jennifer Bjorhus
   Mercury News

   The U.S. economy might be stalling, but at least one niche is hot:
   shipping technology jobs offshore.

   The economic slowdown is speeding up the export of jobs, experts say.
   As executives face smaller budgets and more pressure for profits, they
   find it much cheaper to send work to contractors overseas. More U.S.
   companies are following Silicon Valley's lead by shifting engineering
   and other technology-related jobs to places such as China, Ireland,
   India and the Philippines to cut costs.

   The drift of jobs is worrying engineering groups, renewing fears that
   white-collar tech jobs in the United States are going the way of
   blue-collar manufacturing jobs: over the border and across the seas.

   A major engineering group has asked Congress to investigate whether
   the offshore trend, combined with U.S. companies importing foreign
   engineers on H-1B visas, is partly to blame for high unemployment
   among U.S. engineers.

   [snip]

   Norman Matloff, a professor of computer science at the University of
   California-Davis, argues that the actual number of software jobs being
   shipped overseas is a fraction of the country's total. And it will
   remain small, he argues, because nothing beats face time at the soda
   machine for finishing engineering jobs right.

   [snip]

   Labor experts say no one knows how many engineering jobs the United
   States has lost because of the recent uptick in offshore outsourcing.
   The bigger issue, some say, is the U.S. tech jobs that fail to
   materialize because of the overseas hiring.

   ``It's worrisome,'' said Terry Oldberg, a Los Altos Hills engineer and
   organizer for the Programmers Guild. ``We're not organized to fight
   it.''"

There is NO government agency chartered to track offshore job relocations
and their resultant impact on tax revenues, which have taken a dramatic
unexplained drop in the last five months (URL wrapped to 2 lines):

   http://www.montanaforum.com/rednews/2002/08/28/build/accountability/
   surplusshrinks.php
   Budget Surplus Shrinks 60% In Only 5 Months

  "The Washington Post

   WASHINGTON - The most dramatic drop in tax revenue since 1946 has put
   the government into deficit for the next three years and has shriveled
   the projected 10-year federal budget surplus by 60 percent in just
   five months, the Congressional Budget Office reported Tuesday.

   [snip]

   Economists appeared to be at a loss to explain it. Crippen merely
   called it "astounding..."


--Jerry Leslie   (my opinions are strictly my own)
  Note: [log in to unmask] is invalid for email

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