Outsourcing, Turned Inside Out (original) (raw)
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- April 11, 2004
WHEN word got out last spring that Microsoft was building a phone center in Bangalore, India, the 1,400 workers at the company's offices outside Dallas had reason to be concerned. After all, many of them spent their days doing the work planned for the Bangalore center: fielding calls from customers. Although Microsoft says the new Indian operation has not caused the loss of full-time jobs at that Texas customer support center, dozens of contract workers have been let go there.
About 200 miles down the highway, in Austin, a far different story was unfolding. In early May, Samsung, the highflying South Korean electronics conglomerate, announced plans to spend $500 million to expand its seven-year-old semiconductor plant a few miles north of the city and to hire up to 300 workers, bringing its total work force there to more than 1,000.
Samsung's recent investment highlights the flip side of the outsourcing debate. Foreign direct investment, once an object of scorn, fear and recrimination in the United States, is increasingly regarded as a source of new jobs, production and exports. Such ''insourcing,'' as proponents have come to call it, suggests that free trade is not the one-way street that critics make it out to be.
Throughout the United States, from the high-tech corridor of central Texas to the automobile plants of the Deep South to the pharmaceutical laboratories scattered throughout New Jersey and Massachusetts, foreign companies are spending billions of dollars to build or expand operations. In the process, they are lifting local economies and offsetting some of the jobs being sent offshore by American companies.
Proponents of free trade point to the near-record 6.4 million Americans who worked for foreign companies as of 2001, the last year for which complete figures were available. They also note that while more jobs are being outsourced than insourced, the number of new workers employed by foreign companies more than doubled during the 15 years ended in 2001. By comparison, the number that moved offshore -- roughly 10 million, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis -- grew by only 56 percent in the same period.
''The opponents of outsourcing take insourcing for granted,'' said Nancy McLernon, deputy director of the Organization for International Investment, a group representing foreign companies in the United States. ''In discussions on global trade, the spotlight usually is focused on those that are harmed by it, not those that benefit.''
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