Oppose Offshoring: Campaign Overview
A rapidly growing trend to outsource high-tech and professional jobs to foreign countries directly threatens the livelihoods of many members of the National Writers Union, other writers, and American high-tech workers and professionals. The export of these jobs, including the processing of vast quantities of personal data, also threatens the economic and personal security of tens of millions of Americans.
According to a recent study by UC Berkeley, as many as 14 million U.S. white-collar jobs are at risk as a result of the new offshoring trend. The export of information-industry jobs represents a new aspect of the global restructuring of work and economic relations of the last two decades. If allowed to continue unabated, this new wave of offshoring will have a profound negative impact on the U.S. economy and on American workers and citizens. For a general overview of the extent and impact of high-tech offshoring, see High-Tech Offshoring.
As writers, offshoring harms us in several ways:
- Tech and business writers: Writing work is being offshored along with other high-tech and professional work. All of the projects, departments, and divisions that are being offshored require websites, manuals, technical-specifications, business plans, environmental and other kinds of reports, user documentation, admin manuals, and so on. This and similar work is done by business and technical writers, and it is being offshored along with the technical work it supports.
- Authors and journalists: Offshoring is bringing about big changes in the publishing industry. As electronic-based publishing moves abroad, it changes many aspects of the relationship between writer and publisher--from the export of many journalism and research jobs, to foreign-based editing, to remote publishing.
- All writers: The impact of offshoring, even when jobs are not immediately at risk, is to drive down pay scales for the jobs that remain stateside and to exert downward pressure on working conditions for all writers who work in the U.S.
In addition, writers are also citizens. Even if our work has not yet been offshored, we are affected as members of our communities. Offshoring eliminates jobs, forces wages down, erodes the tax base, restricts opportunity, and weakens the economy for all.
Our Strategy
Powerful economic forces are promoting the offshoring of high-tech and professional work. Multinational corporations, the economic power structure, and the business lobby strongly favor offshoring and are dead set against any government restrictions on it. The mass media promotes the establishment ideology of "free enterprise" and "free market" and the myth that globalization and offshoring are"good" for everybody. For a rebuttal of such arguments, see Frequently Stated Misconceptions--FSMs.
While some have opposed offshoring on nationalist and xenophobic grounds, such arguments are self-defeating. In the long run, the best response to offshoring is to unite with people suffering in low-wage nations, help them form unions, and support their efforts to achieve decent pay and working conditions.
This is going to be a long, tough fight. It can only be won by focusing such massive public pressure on the issue that the politicians fear losing popular votes more than they fear losing the support of their corporate backers. To do this, we have to pose our issues in such a way that politicians pay a heavy political price for siding with the offshoring corporations.
As writers alone, we are too few and too peripheral to generate any effective opposition to the offshoring of our work. However, we are not alone on this issue. Much of the labor movement and many progressive organizations have voiced opposition to offshoring. Already, there are at least nine bills pending in the U.S. House and Senate to restrict offshoring in some way, and a wide range of legislation pending in the majority of states. See Offshoring Legislation.
To mobilize public support, we have to educate and appeal to the public at large. We have to provide insight into why offshoring is bad for all of us. This means that we need to lead with our strongest arguments on the clearest issues to first convince people to question, and then oppose, at least some aspect of offshoring.
From the point of view of the public at large, the clearest issues that have emerged in the public discourse and in legislative initiatives are
- The encouragement of offshoring by public agencies. See Government Offshoring .
- The threats to individual privacy due to the offshoring of personal data. See Offshoring Privacy Threat .
If a foothold can be gained on these issues, it lays the foundation for opposing other aspects of offshoring, such as those that spcifically and directly affect writers and high-tech workers. Our first task, therefore, is to crack the "offshoring is good for all" perception and lay the groundwork for broader public understanding and broader support for the issues that impact us most directly.
