IT: Can legislation help?

There is a buzz in the air that is of major concern to the IT workers of America. The buzz has reached the ears of our lawmakers and they are attempting to pass laws to help. Currently, in New Jersey, legislators are working toward setting a precedent.

Only recently, however, is such logic gaining ground with legislators. As the prospect of paying drastically reduced wages for qualified workers prompts a growing number of U.S. companies to shift technology and services jobs overseas, state and federal lawmakers are beginning to consider setting limits on outsourcing. So far, efforts have focused largely on contracts for government work.

So far, they think that this will pass if they apply it to government jobs. The ideology is that the taxpayers are paying for the government workers’ salaries so the money should stay here in the U.S.

This little bite, irks me.

Josh Bivens, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, says data he’s examined draws a similar conclusion. While companies are indeed outsourcing work overseas at a growing rate, it is still only a miniscule portion of the overall labor market, based on the most recent data from the U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis.

I am most certain that if the economists were being outsourced overseas the portion wouldn’t seem so miniscule. Now this bite gives me a bit of hope.

What the data appears to indicate, Bivens said, is that the IT job market has followed the downward trends of the general economy. And while he believes it’s likely that more lower-level service jobs, such as call center operations, will head overseas, companies will still see value in hiring their top positions close to home.

Source: Wired Magazine