Will Your Job be Exported?

(This article is an expository essay – writing that is meant to inform and/or persuade – by Alan S. Blinder, a professor of Economics at Princeton University, USA.)

Key Points:

• The greatest problem for the next generation of American workers may not be lack of education, but rather “offshoring” – the movement of jobs overseas, especially to countries with much lower wages, such as Indian and China.
• Manufacturing jobs have been migrating overseas for decades. In future, it is going to be service jobs that will migrate.
• Service-sector offshoring will eventually exceed manufacturing-sector offshoring by a hefty margin – for three main reasons.  
  • The first, there are vastly more service jobs than manufacturing jobs in the United States.
  • The second, the technological advances that have made service-sector offshoring possible will continue and accelerate.
  • The third, the number of (e.g., Indian and Chinese) workers capable of performing service jobs offshore seems certain to grow.
• What distinguishes the jobs that cannot be offshored from the ones that can? Whether the service is personal or impersonal. Personal services (e.g., driving a taxi, brain surgery, college teaching, etc.) versus impersonal services (e.g., call centers, keyboard data entry, etc.) Many of the impersonal service jobs will migrate offshore, but the personal service jobs will stay.
• It seems highly likely that the relative demand for labor in the United States will shift away from impersonal services and toward personal services.
• Over the next generation, the kind of education our young people receive may prove to be more important than how much education they receive.
• Hence, it is essential to educate America’s youth for the personal service occupations that are not offshorable.
• Good communication skills need to be developed at schools. More vocational education should be provided at colleges. Nurses, carpenters, and plumbers will be needed more in the future.
• Educational reforms should be made – “repair our tattered social safety net”. A variety of public policy levers are needed.

(Source: Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum, 11th Edition, by Laurence Behrens & Leonard J. Rosen)