Sidebar: Bill Would Force Disclosure of Offshore Plans

Computerworld - WASHINGTON -- Companies that plan to move IT jobs overseas may be required to disclose layoff plans three months in advance, under a bill introduced last week by Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.).
Daschle said he was responding to a Bush administration argument put forth by Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, defending a free-trade approach to the offshoring of service jobs, including IT jobs.
In testimony last week before the Senate's Joint Economic Committee, Mankiw argued that offshore outsourcing lowers business costs and allows a company "to devote its resources to more productive purposes."
Citing a loss of 2.9 million private-sector jobs since January 2001, Daschle said "there is nothing good about offshoring."
High-tech union leaders praised the legislation, maintaining that public disclosure of offshoring may discourage the practice. Moreover, once state and local governments become aware of an employer's offshore plans, "there can be a lot of pressure points applied to companies moving work overseas," such as revoking tax breaks, said Marcus Courtney, president of the Seattle-based Washington Alliance of Technology Workers.
But there's little that legislation can do to deter companies motivated by "solid business reasons" from offshoring IT work, said Stan Lepeak, an analyst at Meta Group Inc. Companies can avoid a disclosure rule by outsourcing jobs to U.S. vendors and letting the vendors shift the jobs overseas, said Lepeak.

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