Washington, Aug 23: As President and chief bottle-washer at his one-man web development design firm, Mark Oesterle often has to decide which high-tech workers to hire to fill a stream of small contracts.
Sometimes he uses locals in Charlotte, North Carolina, to programme and design. Other times, he’ll throw the work to high-tech mavens in Austin, Texas, Columbia or South Carolina. With virtual work, geography isn’t important. Except that for Mr Oesterle, who regularly attends a job-seekers’ group studded with unemployed high-tech workers, geography ends at the US border. He has vowed not to move work to overseas markets like India, where eager high-tech workers can be hired at a fraction of US costs. “I’d rather give up the business than take away jobs from people who are unemployed,” Mr Oesterle said.

The 45-year-old is swimming against a stiff current. A study last month by a computer consulting firm found one in 10 jobs in US computer services and software could move to emerging markets such as India or Russia by the end of ’04.

Examples abound. IBM has said it has no choice but to expand software and semiconductor development overseas. Electronic Data Systems Corp, the world’s No 2 computer services firm, has moved work to what it calls the most economical locations — including India, Egypt, Poland, Canada and Brazil.

A raft of technology jobs has vanished since the ’01 slump began. Of 2.7m jobs lost since March ’01, more than half a million — or one in five — have been in programming, Internet publishing, computer systems design, telecommunications and data processing.

America has long relied on cheap immigrant labour, filling jobs US workers find unappealing. Even sending factory jobs to Asia or Mexico has been grudgingly accepted by consumers as the best way to satisfy their appetite for inexpensive clothing and electronics.
But with businesses now shipping white-collar service and high-tech jobs overseas to cut costs, a whole new sector and class of workers is feeling the pain. Bureau Report