By George J. Bryjak
Checking your credit card statement, a friendly voice greets you with: "Hi, ma name's Debbie, kin I hep ya? But this young woman trained to sound like a Texan resides in India. The original worker from Dallas whose job was sent to Asia is a victim of "outsourcing," the euphemism for transferring work to offshore locations.
Few people realize the magnitude and implications of this hemorrhaging of U.S. jobs.
Economists Ashok Bardhan and Cynthia Kroll of the University of California at Berkeley estimate that in July of 2003 between 25,000 and 30,000 IT (information technology) positions were outsourced to India alone. According to the Bureau of Vital Statistics, since 2001 "more than 500,000 people in IT professions in the United States have lost their jobs."
These staggering figures are just the beginning. A study of 400 of the nation's top 1,000 companies concluded that by 2006, between 35 percent and 45 percent of current full-time IT jobs will be sent overseas. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that of the almost 128 million workers in this country, 11 percent
