Companies are not required to keep any records of jobs outsourced. None. And what's really amazing is that most of the very few statistics that are available are from the outsourcing firms themselves.
But, we know that there were more than 2 million manufacturing jobs lost -- and that's prior to 2004.
And in the service industry alone,
with jobs leaving at a rate of 12,000 to 15,000 per month, says John McCarthy, the company's director of research. Other estimates say up to 20,000 jobs a month may be moving overseas.
CFR
India expects to create 2 million jobs in the next decade in offshore BPO. Guess where those jobs are going to be coming from.
That's just India, just "BPO" (business process outsourcing, not manufacturing or other sectors--in other words, just directly moving a job there) and that estimate was 2004 --how about China or Vietnam or Thailand? We simply don't know.
Of course, when I refer to 'outsourcing' I'm not talking just about a firm contracting direct replacements in IT and customer service, etc, but about the movement of entire industries to countries with lax environmental protections, anti-worker, and anti-union policies, or borderline or actual slave labor, child labor and so on.
There are reasons labor is cheaper elsewhere.
If you buy a dozen Chinese made Jinma Tractors to build a road, while you have created a temporary few jobs here building it, but you have done nothing to stem the flow. Even if you do build the tractors locally, as Japan does, Japan found out in the 1980s and 1990s that building roads and bridges had no effect on it's economy, although investing in schools and such did.
The loss of the American auto industry would probably not count as 'outsourcing' (if anyone kept score) since the jobs will not go directly to Japan, China or even Alabama. But clearly, it's the same trend: moving to cheap non-union labor, worse job conditions and to areas of the world with weaker environmental standards.
The argument has been made that China and other developing nations deserve the same opportunities that we had--that eventually came out of our own heavy industrial period. I agree with that: they deserve unions, and better working conditions, and cleaner air. Let's outsource those items.
The converse is likely to happen if we do nothing--in order to 'compete' US and Euro workers will be forced into conditions much like those in China, and our pollution will be outsourced again--right back at us.
What is happening now globally is however interesting & complicated: not only have there been huge job losses in America and western Europe, but in China as well, because as we can't afford to buy their stuff, plants are being idled--which is very easy to do in a country with no social service net at all--just send 'em home and call 'em back when you need them again, if they haven't starved in the meantime.
Basically what we're facing is a global shell game--move the work to Mexico, they demand a few rights, move it to China, and so on, and eventually even back here, once the balance of weakened wages at home and oil (shipping) prices has been reached. Everyone loses. It's true that we are in a global economy; we need to act globally and that starts by demanding protectionist policies based on an exporters environmental and labor policies, and by our unions freedom to export themselves (should any of them care to). Barring that, I predict the stimulus and upcoming auto bailouts will be about as effective as the banking one has been.