Alan Blinder on "offshoring":
Offshoring and Inequality | TPMCafe: By Ganesh Sitaraman: You probably didn’t notice Princeton economist Alan Blinder’s testimony to the Joint Economic Committee a few weeks ago, but Blinder has peered into the future and identified a crisis that’s just waiting to explode. It’s called offshoring – the movement of jobs or business processes to other countries. So far offshoring has only touched a few areas – manufacturing notable among them--but Blinder thinks that up to 29% of American jobs are offshorable, including many service-industy jobs. Even if only half those jobs go overseas, that’s a crisis of epic proportions....
[T]he dividing line between jobs that are deliverable electronically (and thus are threatened by offshoring) and those that are not does not correspond to traditional distinctions between high-end and low-end work.
The added danger of offshoring is compounded by the rising inequality America has seen since the 1970s. Earnings from work for less-skilled and less-educated workers can't keep up with earnings of the elites in society. These troubles, caused by the market, not by government, have in the last few years been “piled on by enacting tax cuts for the rich while either permitting or causing large holes to emerge in the social safety net.” So when your job is offshored, you’ll be worse off because of the recent erosion of the nation's social and economic safety programs....
Blinder offers two solutions:
First, we need to repair and extend the social safety net for displaced workers. This includes unemployment insurance, trade adjustment assistance, job retraining, the minimum wage, the EITC, universal health insurance, and pension portability--plus other, newer ideas like wage loss insurance.
Second, we must take steps to ensure that our labor force and our businesses supply and demand the types of skills and jobs that are going to remain in America rather than move offshore. Among other things, that may require substantial changes in our educational system—all the way from kindergarten through college.
