U.S.-based technology consulting firms have been relentlessly selling the joys of offshoring to their peers. Electronic Data Systems, for instance, has more than 15 centers -- in locations such as Auckland, New Zealand; São Paulo, Brazil; and Chennai, India -- doing everything from help-desk support to application coding, as part of its "Best Shores" initiative.

The company's marketing paean to what it calls "global sourcing" purrs that foreign workers provide not just a cost savings but also "faster innovation, reduced time to market, and a greater ability to constantly take advantages of new opportunities in the rapidly changing global marketplace." In other words, the workers of the rest of the world can get the job done faster and cheaper than the ones in the United States.

EDS is far from the only technology consulting firm bragging about what offshoring can do for its clients; other biggies, including Hewlett-Packard and IBM, are selling the same line. Software and hardware companies are buying the pitch. Brian Valentine, a senior vice president for Microsoft's Windows division, gave a presentation last July called "Thinking About India," in which he exhorted Microsoft managers to get the outsourcing "religion," because competitors such as G.E., Dell and Cisco already had.

"Outsourcing is not just for non-critical work," Valentine wrote in his presentation, which is reproduced on the Web site of the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers (WashTech), a tech workers group that is lobbying and organizing against the practice. "Redmond is not the center of the universe." By sending software development to facilities in India, Microsoft can expect "quality work at 50 to 60 percent of the cost," he continued. "That's two heads for the price of one."

"These aren't low-level jobs that we're talking about that are being sent overseas," says Marcus Courtney, an organizer with WashTech. "These are America's best-paying jobs."

Courtney believes the outsourcing trend is undermining a U.S. tech job market that's already soft. WashTech has asked Congress' General Accounting Office to investigate how the phenomenon is affecting the U.S. labor market. Several states, including New Jersey, Connecticut and Washington, have introduced legislation to ban spending state money with American companies that outsource.

No one really knows how many jobs have been exported so far, but whether they're hyping the trend or sounding the alarm against it, industry trade organizations, analysts and workers' groups agree that outsourcing is taking off. John C. McCarthy, an analyst with Forrester Research, predicts that in the next 15 years, 3.3. million U.S. service jobs, from accounting to software development, totaling $136 billion in wages, will move offshore to countries such as India, Russia and China.

In the computer industry, McCarthy calculated that 27,171 computer jobs were sent offshore in 2000; he predicts the industry will send 108,991 jobs offshore by 2005, and 472,632 jobs by 2015. According to the Information Technology Association of America, approximately 10.3 million workers are or have been employed in the information technology (IT) sector in 2003.

McCarthy believes contractors are most likely to be affected. "Traditionally, if you lost your job, you could go work as a contractor, and in some cases make more money. That kind of escape valve has disappeared," he says.

In a 2003 survey of some 400 IT managers, the Information Technology Association of America found that 12 percent of the companies surveyed had already sent jobs offshore, and that 67 percent of the respondents who were engaged in outsourcing pinpointed software engineering and programming as the areas in which they'd made the move.

The rush to outsource is a case where corporate interests are flatly at odds with those of individual workers and, possibly, of the national economy. From a corporate executive's point of view, it would be irresponsible to the shareholders not to take advantage of a way to get twice the work for half the money. It would be negligent. But for American workers, the equation works out differently.

Marcus Courtney has been organizing around tech worker issues for more than five years. He says he's seen a "grassroots explosion" over the issue of H-1B guest workers and offshoring in recent months. It's a labor movement with a twist -- tech workers are notoriously anti-union, tending toward the libertarian end of the political spectrum. But a free market working against them means that it's time to organize for a little protection.

The tenor of the debate ranges from serious political advocacy on the topic of how H-1B visas and offshoring are affecting the American economy and xenophobic fulminations dedicated to immigrant bashing.

"I do think that there's some scapegoating," says Daniel T. Griswold, an economist with the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. "When the economy turns down, foreigners get blamed."

The countries benefiting from offshoring deny that they're stealing American jobs. On the contrary, they contend the opposite. In Bangalore in late June, the chair of the National Association of Software and Service Companies, a trade group, argued that outsourcing jobs to India will not lead to job losses in the United States. Instead, outsourcing will help U.S. companies survive the downturn in the global economy. Chairman Som Mittal predicted that once the economy ticks up, concerns about outsourcing will recede.

John Bauman, president of the Organization for the Rights of American Workers, a nonprofit in Meriden, Conn., disagrees. His organization protests outside conferences that teach companies to outsource, its members arming themselves with signs that say "Outsourcing Is Stealing Billions From Americans," "Stop Outsourcing. Save America. Hire American" and "Will Code for Food."

Bauman says that his group wants to change American laws, not bash foreigners: "We have no grudges against these people coming over here [on H-1B visas.] They're very nice people regardless of what country they're from. They themselves are not at fault; these laws that are allowing them to literally replace our U.S. workers are."

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