`Third wave' of US job exports: engineering, medical

Date: Monday, February 24, 2003 1:58 PM

H-1B and JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER

www.ZaZona.com

Robery Lipsey, a City University of New York professor said that
workers in high-wage countries are just going to have to learn to
adapt. He also said that they will "want to train themselves better."

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/worldbiz/archives/2003/02/22/195540/

Published on TaipeiTimes
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/worldbiz/archives/2003/02/22/195540
`Third wave' of US job exports: engineering, medical

AFP
Saturday, Feb 22, 2003,Page 12
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.

Help to Keep ZaZona.com Online

Donate to the Cause at
http://www.zazona.com/Donations.htm
To Subscribe or Unsubcribe send an email to

Back to archives