Behind Outsourcing Debate: Surprisingly Few Hard Numbers
Desperate to cut costs in its struggling Internet-equipment business, executives at Infineon Technologies AG decided last year to eliminate 40 high-paying engineering jobs at its San Jose research facility and transfer the work to India.
At about the same time, the German semiconductor company started adding about 150 engineers and other white-collar workers at its operations in Cary, N.C., and Burlington, Vt., catering to a different set of customers.
Is Infineon contributing to the movement of American jobs overseas? "In my little world, it is so difficult to reconcile the numbers," says Robert LeFort, president of Infineon's North American operation.
Infineon's global job dance spotlights a fundamental question in the debate about the shift of U.S. jobs abroad. Just how do you count the number of jobs that are gained or lost as companies shuffle their operations around the world? While Infineon workers in San Jose are feeling the pinch from outsourcing, those in Cary or Burlington are overlooked beneficiaries of insourcing, or employment created by foreign investment in the U.S.
The economic picture is further complicated because there are clear -- though hard to pinpoint -- benefits to moving operations overseas, such as cheaper goods for U.S. consumers. And those benefits are easily obscured by stark examples of job loss.
The government doesn't keep count of jobs leaving the country, and the statistics available on outsourcing are sketchy. Election-year politics is only turning up the volume on the debate. Though U.S. companies have been shifting jobs overseas for decades, the latest wave has been especially scary to some because it includes well-paying white-collar jobs, not just factory workers.
The shifting of jobs is becoming a hot-button issue overseas too. Infineon's chief executive officer, Ulrich Schumacher, stepped down last month after clashing with unions and board members over plans to move jobs around the globe and other matters.
The actual number of jobs lost to outsourcing and its impact are a lot less clear than the politicians and media jumping on the issue acknowledge. Many economists estimate that roughly 100,000 white-collar jobs migrate overseas each year. That is a substantial number, though actually relatively small when measured against the size of the labor market and job losses that occur for others reasons.
For a sense of the confusion over the outsourcing numbers, consider a set of oft-cited estimates from John McCarthy, a researcher at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass.
In April 2002, Mr. McCarthy traveled to India in an effort to develop and sell research about offshore outsourcing. He left impressed with the country's ability to win contracts from American companies for white-collar work, such as processing insurance claims. When he returned to his office, he gathered newspaper clippings and pored through Labor Department statistics on 505 white-collar occupations. Based on his own assumptions about the vulnerability of various job categories to outsourcing, he made an educated guess about how many jobs would be shipped offshore by 2015.
His number -- 3.3 million jobs representing $136 billion in wages -- fed a growing media and political storm. BusinessWeek highlighted the number in a February 2003 cover story. The Wall Street Journal has referred to it at least five times. Lou Dobbs, a CNN business-news anchor, has made mention of the numbers on several occasions in his criticisms of businesses that move jobs overseas.
Sen. John Kerry, the likely Democratic presidential candidate, cited the Forrester research last November when he introduced legislation to regulate the call-center industry, noting in a press release, "this is 2% of the entire work force." Tom Daschle, the Senate Minority Leader, latched onto Mr. McCarthy's numbers when Democrats introduced legislation in February requiring companies to file disclosures when they send jobs overseas.
Mr. McCarthy now says his numbers were hyped and that it "makes me a little mad." He says the projected loss of jobs and income will occur over a number of years, mostly later in the decade. To date, he says, the actual number of white-collar jobs that have moved offshore is less than 300,000. That equals only about 0.2% of the total job market in any given year.
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Jon Hilsenrath says the problem with the outsourcing debate is the costs of outsourcing are easy to identify while the benefits are harder to pinpoint.
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"I'm in awe that 18 months later I'm still getting five calls a day" about the report, says Mr. McCarthy. He refers to the increased attention on Indian companies as "this call center baloney."
Another widely cited estimate, produced last year by International Data Corp., a market-research company in Framingham, Mass., now appears to be flawed. Last year, an IDC analyst surveyed eight executives at technology-service companies and estimated that 23% of all white-collar tech jobs will be filled offshore by 2007, up from 5% this year. The statistics were published by the Associated Press, several midsize daily newspapers, the Los Angeles Times and the Journal, as well as trade publications.
Michael Shirer, an IDC spokesman, says the methodology in the report was "a little wobbly" and the result probably an overestimate. "We're working on a more rigorous number," he says. IDC says it will complete the new research by the middle of the year.
"There is a great deal of partial telling of the story," says Jitendra Singh, a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, who has studied outsourcing. "It is understandable given the political season that we are in."
The great unknown is how much outsourcing will accelerate in the years ahead. While uncertain about absolute numbers, many economists agree that it probably will pick up. A March survey of 216 U.S. chief financial officers found that 27% planned to send more work offshore in the coming year. Among companies that already employed workers offshore, 61% said they expect to increase the offshore component, according to the survey by Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and Financial Executives International, an association of finance executives. Mark Zandi, an economist with Economy.com, a research firm in West Chester, Pa., projects that the amount of white collar and manufacturing work that is sent offshore will increase from about 300,000 jobs per year today to about 600,000 jobs per year by the end of the decade. "At this point, it is accelerating," said Mr. Zandi.
Even the highest estimates of job losses to outsourcing are small compared with the gross number of jobs lost in a given year. An average of 15 million jobs were eliminated annually in the U.S. over the past decade, said Ben Bernanke, a Federal Reserve Governor, in a recent speech. But those lost jobs typically are offset by the creation of new jobs in a labor market remarkable for its high level of churn.
Economists aren't free of the biases that accompany such debates. Most were reared on the theories of David Ricardo, a 19th century economist who laid out the principles of free trade. Mr. Ricardo believed that countries should specialize in areas in which they were relatively more advantaged than their international trading partners. He argued that when countries lowered trade barriers, everyone would benefit because they would be able to buy and produce goods more cheaply.
In political terms, it's easy to see why the outsourcing debate is dominated by critics of moving jobs overseas. While the cost to individuals who lose their jobs is obvious, the benefits of outsourcing are hard to define.
In the 1980s and '90s, two-thirds of workers who lost jobs in manufacturing industries hit by overseas competition earned less on their next job, according to a study by Lori Kletzer, an economist at the University of California Santa Cruz. A quarter of workers who lost their jobs and were re-employed saw income fall 30% or more.
The benefits of outsourcing, such as lower prices for goods and services and increased exports to fast-growing countries, are less tangible. The U.S. may be sending more jobs to India, but it also is receiving something in return. For example, U.S. educational institutions collected $1.2 billion from Indian nationals in 2002, six times the amount received from British students, according to the Commerce Department.
One method analysts have used to estimate white-collar job loss has been to look at job growth in countries grabbing U.S. business. India's National Association of Software and Service Companies estimates that between March 2000 and March 2004, employment of workers such as software developers and call-center operators, who serve clients outside India, increased by 353,000 to 505,000. About 70%, or 247,000, of those additional workers were serving clients in the U.S., estimates Sunil Mehta, a vice president at the association.
It's impossible to know if all those new Indian workers specifically replaced jobs in the U.S., suggesting that outsourcing's impact could be lower than even these numbers suggest. Some of the workers could have been hired as part of an overseas expansion or to fill positions that never existed in the U.S.
Other countries winning offshore work have seen much smaller growth in employment from offering business services to U.S. companies. In Ireland, the number of those jobs created by U.S. multinationals increased by just 2,277 between 2000 and 2002, according to the Industrial Development Agency of Ireland.
Other countries are growing fast but from a small base. In the Philippines, the number of people doing back-office work for non-Philippine companies totaled just 39,500 in 2003, compared with 25,000 a year earlier, according to SPI Technologies Inc., a Philippine company that provides business services such as call centers.
Ravi Aron, a Wharton School professor, calculated the impact of offshore outsourcing in a different way and came up with a number similar to that of other analysts. Noting the change in revenues of firms providing services mostly to U.S companies, he believes that between 2000 and 2004, about 440,000 U.S. white-collar jobs were lost to outsourcing in India and other countries.
It's easy to find examples of industries that on the surface look as though they have been hit by the latest wave of outsourcing. Between 2000 and 2003, employment in the U.S. among computer programmers, as defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, fell 182,000 to 563,000. The number of airline reservation agents fell 35,000 to 179,000 and tax preparation experts fell 3,000 to 91,000.
But many factors have caused these declines. They include the technology boom's sudden collapse in 2001, the subsequent recession and hesitant recovery, and, perhaps most notably, improvement in worker productivity in the U.S. that's allowing companies to produce more with less.
"There is an enormous overlap between the kinds of jobs that are being automated and the kinds of jobs that are going offshore," says Frank Levy, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor. Jobs that can be automated tend to be simple and easily describable in writing, the same criteria that often send jobs overseas.
The movement of manufacturing jobs overseas has been a larger phenomenon than white-collar jobs, many economists say. Goldman Sachs estimates that up to one million manufacturing jobs have been shifted overseas since 2001 by U.S. companies or their suppliers.
Andrew Tilton, a Goldman Sachs economist, studied relocation announcements and other sources showing employment by American companies outside the U.S. He estimates that companies have moved 300,000 to 500,000 manufacturing jobs to their own subsidiaries overseas and shifted another half a million to third parties.
In manufacturing, too, outsourcing does not seem to be the driving force behind falling employment, economists say. The jobs identified by Goldman constitute only about a third of the net decline in manufacturing employment during the past three years, as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Joseph Carson, an economist with Alliance Capital Management LP in New York, argues that job loss in manufacturing is a global phenomenon related largely to improved productivity. He looked at employment trends in 20 large economies and found that from 1995 to 2003, 18 million jobs in the manufacturing sector were eliminated around the globe as companies found more efficient ways to work.
According to his research, China was the biggest loser, with 13 million manufacturing jobs eliminated between 1995 and 2003, mostly because of restructuring of state-run enterprises. Manufacturing employment started to pick up again in 2002. Japan lost more manufacturing jobs than the U.S. during the eight-year period. "The bigger story is improved productivity rather than outsourcing," says Mr. Carson.
Underscoring Mr. Carson's analysis are statistics kept by the Labor Department on "mass layoffs." When companies lay off 50 people or more, the Labor Department asks company officials to explain the reason. According to these figures, just 2% of workers affected by "mass layoffs" during the past five years came from companies relocating operations overseas or from import competition. That's about the same level as the mid-to-late 1990s.
美国外包争议的数字误区
英飞凌科技公司(Infineon Technologies AG)的互联网设备业务在困境中苦苦挣扎，基于削减成本的迫切需要，该公司管理层去年决定裁减圣荷塞研究部门的40个高薪工程师职位，并将此业务转移至印度。
几乎与此同时，这家德国半导体公司在北卡罗来纳州克利和佛蒙特州伯林顿开始新增150个诸如工程师等白领职位，以迎合不同客户的需求。
英飞凌是否在为美国的外包潮流推波助澜呢？英飞凌北美业务总裁罗伯特?勒夫特(Robert LeFort)说，"对我个人来说，让上面这两个数字保持一致非常困难。"
英飞凌全球职位的此消彼涨凸现出有关美国就业外包争议中的一个基本问题：如何计算各个公司在全球调整业务的过程中新创造的或失去的工作职位？英飞凌圣荷塞的员工在为外包感到郁闷的同时，那些在克利和伯林顿的人作为内包受益者（即外国公司在美国创造的就业机会）却没有被人们注意到。
经济层面的情况就更加复杂了。虽然难以精确衡量，但是将业务外包到海外有明显的好处，如美国消费者能买到更便宜的商品。然而这些好处很容易就被失业的赤裸裸实例所抹杀。
美国政府没有对流失到海外的工作职位进行统计，有关外包的统计数据都是粗略的。大选年政治不过是放大了这场争论的分贝。虽然美国公司向海外转移工作职位已有数十年的时间了，但最近的这股潮流却特别让一些人惶恐不安，因为高薪的白领工作也被牵涉其中，而不仅仅只是工厂工人的工作。
工作职位外流在美国以外也成为了一个热门话题。英飞凌的首席执行长乌尔里奇?舒马赫(Ulrich Schumacher)上月因与工会和董事会成员在将工作职位转移至全球各地等问题上存在严重分歧而辞职。
外包导致的职位流失的实际数字以及影响远远没有政客和媒体炒作的那么确切。很多经济学家估计，每年大约有10万个白领工作转移到美国以外。这是一个相当大的数字，尽管同就业市场的规模以及因其他原因而裁减的工作数量相比仍相对较小。 为了对外包数据的混乱情况有所认识，让我们来看看研究公司Forrester Research Inc.的研究员约翰?麦卡特尼(John McCarthy)一组经常被援引的估测数字。
2002年4月，麦卡特尼前往印度，打算对海外外包活动进行研究并出售其研究结果。印度赢取美国公司白领工作合同（如处理保险索赔）的能力给他留下了深刻印象。回到公司以后，他收集剪报并对美国劳工部(Labor Department)关于505个白领工作的统计数据进行了仔细研究。根据他自己对各种工作受外包冲击程度的假设，他对2015年之前将有多少工作职位转移至海外作出了一个有根有据的估计。 他的数字是：有330万个工作将流失，这些工作意味总额为1,360亿美元的薪水。这个数字给了正在炒作此事的媒体和政客一个凭据。《商业周刊》(BusinessWeek)在二月的一期封面报导中强调了这个数字。《华尔街日报》(The Wall Street Journal)至少五次提到该数字。CNN财经新闻主播卢?道布斯(Lou Dobbs)在抨击外包的公司时，数次提及了这个数字。
民主党总统候选人约翰?凯利(John Kerry)参议员去年11月在提出一项对呼叫中心行业进行规范的议案时就援引了Forrester的研究结果，他在一份新闻稿中称"这（330万个工作）是美国就业大军的2%"。参议院民主党领导人汤姆?达施勒(Tom Daschle)2月份在提出一项要求公司披露外包工作情况的法案时也采用了麦卡特尼的预测数据。
而麦卡特尼现在说，他的预测数字被滥用了，这令他感到有些愤怒。他说，职位和收入流失的估计数字将在未来数年发生，其中多数要在10年以后。他说，目前，真正转移到海外的白领工作还不到30万。这不过是任何一年美国就业人口的大约0.2%。
麦卡特尼说，"我很惊叹于在18个月过后每天仍接到5个（跟这个报告有关的）电话。"他将外界对印度公司与日俱增的关注称之为"关于呼叫中心的胡扯"。
另外一个被广泛引用的预测数据是市场研究公司国际数据公司(International Data Corp.)去年做出的，但现在看来这个预测是错误的。去年，IDC的一个分析师对8位来自科技服务公司的管理人士进行了调查，他预计，在2007年之前，美国科技业白领工作将有23%转移到海外，而今年这一数字是5%。美联社(Associated Press)、《洛杉矶时报》、《华尔街日报》以及几家中型日报和行业出版物均报导了这个统计数字。
IDC的发言人迈克尔?舍尔(Michael Shirer)说，那份报告的研究方法"有点问题"，而结果可能有些夸张。他说，"我们正在计算一个更严谨的数字。"IDC称将在今年年中完成新研究。
"有关这个事情有很多片面的说法，"宾夕法尼亚大学沃顿商学院(University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School)研究外包的管理学教授杰特德拉?辛(Jitendra Singh)说，"鉴于我们所知的政治原因，这是可以理解的。"
一个很大的未知数是未来几年外包步伐将加速到什么地步。虽然绝对数字还不确定，但很多经济学家一致认为，外包职位数量将会增加。3月份对美国216位首席财务长进行的一份调查发现，27%的公司计划明年将更多岗位转移到海外。根据杜克大学克华商学院(Duke University's Fuqua School of Business)以及国际财务长协会(Financial Executives International)的调查，在那些已在海外有雇员的公司中，有61%的公司表示他们将扩展海外机构。研究公司Economy.com的经济学家马克?赞蒂(Mark Zandi)预计，现在转移到海外的白领和制造业岗位数量是每年30万，预计在这个十年年末将增加到每年60万。赞蒂说，"从这点说，外流速度在加快。"
外包职位流失数量即便在最多时，与任何一年的失业总数相比仍然很少。联邦储备理事会(Federal Reserve Board of Governors)理事本?伯南克(Ben Bernanke)在最近的一次演讲中称，美国过去10年每年减少1,500万个工作机会。但这些失去的工作职位往往会被就业市场新创造的工作职位抵消。 经济学家在这些争论中也难免偏颇。他们多数人都受哺于大卫?李嘉图(David Ricardo)的理论，这位19世纪的经济学家提出了自由贸易理论。李嘉图认为，各个国家应该专注于那些较其贸易伙伴有相对优势的领域。他认为，当各国降低贸易壁垒时，每个人都能受益，因为他们能买到和生产更便宜的货物。
从政治角度看，很容易就知道为什么是那些批评人士主导了外包争议。丢掉工作的个人付出的代价是显而易见的，但外包的好处却难以界定。
根据加州大学圣克鲁斯分校的经济学教授劳利?克莱策(Lori Kletzer)的一项研究，上个世纪80年代和90年代，因海外竞争而丢掉饭碗的美国制造业工人中，有三分之二的人在下一份工作中赚的钱更少了。四分之一的失业工人在重新找到工作后，收入下降了30%或更多。
外包的好处则不那么明显，如商品和服务价格更低以及对经济快速增长国家的出口增加等等。美国可能向印度转移了大量工作职位，但它同时也得到了好处。比如根据美国商务部(Commerce Department)统计数字，美国教育机构2002年从印度学生那就得到了12亿美元收入，是英国留学生学费收入的6倍。
分析师用来估计白领工作流失的一个方法就是看那些夺走美国业务国家的就业增长。印度的全国软件和服务公司协会(National Association of Software and Service Companies)估计，2000年3月到2004年3月之间，诸如软件开发人员和呼叫中心接线员就业人数增加了353,000人，达到505,000人。该协会的副总裁桑尼?莫塔(Sunil Mehta)说，估计这些新增就业人员当中大约70%，即247,000人，是为美国的客户服务。
要想弄清楚是否就是这些新增的印度雇员取代了美国的工作职位是不可能的，这说明外包影响可能没有这些数据暗示的那么严重。一些工人可能只是美国公司海外业务拓展所雇佣的，或是他们从事的工作根本就没有在美国存在过。
在其他一些获得外包工作的国家，为美国公司提供服务对其就业增长就没有那么显著的推动作用。据爱尔兰行业发展机构(Industrial Development Agency of Ireland)称，在爱尔兰，美国跨国公司创造的工作职位在2000年至2002年只增长了大约2,277人。
而其他一些国家就业则见迅速增长，但这是因为其基数较低的缘故。据SPI Technologies Inc称，在菲律宾，为国外公司提供后勤服务的人员数量在2003年总共只有39,500人，而一年之前更是仅有25,000人。SPI Technologies Inc.是一家提供呼叫中心业务的菲律宾公司。
沃顿商学院教授莱维?阿隆(Ravi Aron)以另外一种方式计算了外包的影响，并得出了一个与其他分析师相似的数字。他在对主要为美国公司提供服务的公司的收入变动状况进行分析后认为，在2000年至2004年间，大约有440,000个美国白领工作职位流向了印度等国家。
一些行业从表面上看是受到了最新一轮外包潮流的冲击，例证很容易可以找到：据美国劳工统计局(Bureau of Labor Statistics)称，在2000年至2003年间，美国电脑编程人员的就业人数减少了182,000人，降至563,000人。机票预定代理人的数量减少35,000人至179,000人，税务专家减少3,000人至91,000人。
但是众多因素导致了上述数字的下降。这其中包括2001年科技泡沫的突然破灭、随后的经济衰退以及疲弱的经济复苏。此外还有美国工人生产率的提高，而这可能是最显著的一个因素，因为生产率提高使得美国公司得以用较少的投入获得更高的产出。
麻省理工学院(Massachusetts Institute of Technology)的经济学教授弗兰克?李维(Frank Levy)说，"可自动化的工作种类和可外包的工作种类之间有相当大的重叠。"可自动化的工作通常较为简单，并且可以很容易进行书面表述，这与外包工作种类的标准相同。
许多经济学家称，制造业职位移向海外的势头一直强于白领职位。高盛(Goldman Sachs)估计自2000年以来美国公司以及其供应商已经将多达100万个制造业职位转移至海外。
高盛经济学家安德鲁?提尔顿(Andrew Tilton)对美国公司的外包声明以及有关就业的信息进行了研究。他估计，美国公司将300,000至500,000个制造业职位转移到海外子公司，并将另外500,000个职位转移给了第三方。
经济学家说，外包似乎也不是制造业就业率下降的主要因素。高盛估计的数字只是美国劳工统计局统计的过去3年制造业职位减少数量的三分之一。
Alliance Capital Management LP驻纽约经济学家约瑟芬?卡尔森(Joseph Carson)认为，制造业职位流失是一个全球现象，在很大程度上与生产率的提高有关。他对20个大型经济体的就业趋势进行了研究，发现从1995年到2003年之间，全球范围内制造业工作职位普遍出现缩减，原因是公司找到了更有效的工作途径。
根据他的研究，中国制造业职位缩减状况最为突出，在1995年至2003年之间，中国制造业减少了1,300万个职位，中国国有企业重组是主要原因。制造业就业人数在2002年开始再度增加。日本制造业在8年间减少的就业人数超过了美国。卡尔森说，"最重要的是生产率的提高而不是外包。"
卡尔森的分析得到了美国劳工部有关"大规模裁员"统计数字的支持。当美国公司裁员超过50人时，美国劳工部会要求公司管理人士解释原因。根据这些数字，过去5年间在受"大规模裁员"影响的工人当中，只有2%的工人是因为业务外包或进口竞争而失去工作。这与上个月世纪90年代中后期的水平相当。
