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[March 16, 2004] More US States Slam Outsourcing [The Times of India] - WASHINGTON: State legislators in Missouri and Kansas have joined the political backlash against "outsourcing" of US tech jobs to India and have sponsored legislation to stem the tide.The state lawmakers have brought bills that would require the states to do certain kinds of business only with contractors that perform the work within the US. "We got a wake-up call last year," said Sen. Joan Bray, a St. Louis Democrat and sponsor of one bill in Missouri. When we found out the Department of Social Services had contracted with a company that moved its call centre to India, we didn't like the idea that we were paying good Missouri tax dollars to employ people overseas." Bray's bill would require the Missouri Office of Administration to contract only with telemarketing or telephone centre services that operate within the United States, according to a report in the Kansas Star, published from Kansas state. The Missouri and Kansas bills join a slew of pending legislation with the same anti-outsourcing goal - domestic job protection. Around the nation, about 80 bills in at least 30 states contain related proposals. At the federal level, there are several legislation - the USA Jobs Protection Act, the Jobs for America Act, the United States Workers Protection Act, and the Defending American Jobs Act pending on Capitol Hill. Job protection amendments are also proposed to the Workforce Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act. So far only a few efforts have become laws designed to hold back the rising outsourcing tide. But they have drawn stiff opposition from business interests, which have ramped up lobbying efforts against them, arguing they would do more economic harm than good. Dennis Hodgins, principal analyst in the Kansas Legislative Research Department, said: "It's a dilemma. We want to protect the state's economy and jobs, but still buy the cheapest possible products. Nobody yet knows the answer to what will happen down the road if all this legislation passes." However, many legislators are not willing to wait and see whether that philosophy comes to pass. In Missouri, for example, one bill before the Senate would prohibit the state from contracting with foreign companies that gather personal information such as social security numbers of Missouri residents. In Kansas, Overland Park Republican Patricia Barbieri-Lightner co-sponsored a bill in the House that would require any vendor or contractor providing services to the state to perform all the work associated with the contract within the United States or pay damages equal to the amount paid for the outsourced work. The bill is unlikely to make it out of the committee this year, she said, but "this may be a start to get people thinking." Whether any of the bills will become law in 2004 is not yet known. Some, like the Kansas bill, already appear to be dead in committees. The National Conference of State Legislatures counted at least eight states with anti-outsourcing bills in 2003. None passed. Also unknown is the exact job-loss numbers attributable to outsourcing. The US Bureau of Labour Statistics does not break down its net job loss count to reflect US jobs lost to overseas. The job-loss estimate that is cited most frequently comes from a 2002 report by Forrester Research, which projected that 3.3 million US jobs would be shipped offshore by 2015. Gartner Inc., another research firm, says 500,000 IT jobs may go offshore by the end of this year. |