What response do you think that U.S. technology workers should make to the offshoring of jobs overseas?
I don’t believe that the phenomenon of outsourcing and offshoring will do anything but proliferate over time. As a consequence, employees and their relationship to an employer will increasingly be flexible and volatile. That means the obligation of the employee is to constantly keep skills upgraded and keep really current in whatever field that you work in. It also means that the social networks that you’re a part of become increasingly important, because they become the vehicle that connects you to employment. The real question, though, about what is to be done about offshoring is that it is as much the employer’s responsibility as it is the employees’. If outsourcing continues as a practice, employers should be obligated to increase the amount of funding that they put into training and to look at calling people back based on seniority. But it’s really a public policy question: How do we reform America’s labor market institutions to respond to a very changing work environment? People
