What started 30 years ago as a drift of manufacturing jobs offshore has become a "third wave" of highly-trained jobs including engineering, architecture and even financial analysis, experts say.
"This seems a re-living of the debate that we had in the 1980s and '90s in respect to manufacturing," said Robert Lawrence, a professor of international trade at Harvard University.
Just as automobiles, computers and textiles moved offshore 30 years ago, today, the US is shedding even medicine and research and development positions paying upwards of US$100,000 a year. jobs that many here once viewed as "safe" from low-wage competitors.
In China, India and countries of the former Soviet bloc, professionals are glad to do the work for as little as one-tenth the wages of a worker in the US or Europe.
First, it was sweatshop jobs that moved overseas. Then, help-desk users who placed their calls in the US discovered their calls were being fielded by technicians anywhere in the English-speaking world -- Ireland, India or Jamaica.
Business Week magazine reported that Massachusetts General Hospital sends 30 CT scans a day to Indian radiologists for interpretation and Ernst and Young farms out its auditing work to Manila.
The cost will be dislocation of those professionals.
Workers in high-wage countries will have to adapt, said Robery Lipsey, a City University of New York professor. "The one possibility is that people here will want to train themselves better."
"If it turns out that it is possible to do these jobs much more cheaply elsewhere, then people will have to move to different occupations or different parts of the same field," he said.
Lipsey said that no one should be surprised.
"These just happen to be [jobs] that people thought of as more American," he said.
As advanced countries move farther into cutting-edge industries, where the wages are highest, they slough off the so-called "sunset industries" to lower-skilled countries where wages are lower, raising efficiency and profits.
"What we have seen is this process of moving higher and higher up the value chain," said Doug Henton, president of Collaborative Economics, which tracks such trends. "Our goal here it to keep going up to the highest value."
That means giving up fields such as mechanical drafting and electronic engineering.
If developed countries keep the edge in biotechnology, nanotechnology and biopharmaceuticals, their workers have nothing to fear.
"The big if -- if we are moving into higher value industries," he said. "There is a problem if workers and companies aren't innovative."
So, the taxi drivers with engineering degrees that are all too common in developing countries may become a thing of the past.
Not so, according to the AFL-CIO federation of US unions.
"Poor countries are tempted to oppress their workers in order to attract production," said AFL-CIO corporate affairs director Ron Blackwell. "If you look at apparel that is sold in the US, the wages of workers in the textile industry have fallen."
That won't change just because the work is done in the mind instead of with the hands, he said.
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