US think-tanks presage fresh anti-BPO bills

US think-tanks foresee many more anti-outsourcing bills in the run-up to the presidential elections as political sentiment predominantly remains 'Buy American'.

These bills will come at both state and federal levels but, like the month-old Senate bill curbing outsourcing of government jobs, they are expected to little damage to the volume of work outsourced to India.

"Efforts are on to pass a number of bills similar to the one passed earlier this year to block offshoring. There are lobbies working actively at both the state and federal level to halt offshoring of US jobs," said Elliot Schwartz, vice president and director of Committee for Economic Development, a US think-tank.

In spite of a strong lobby of small and large corporations rallying to fight anti-outsourcing sentiment in the US, for now politicians are planning to unleash a number of 'cosmetic' and 'synthetic' bills to curb the outsourcing wave.

Especially in states such as South Dakota and Arizona, where a large volume of work was done for credit card companies, politicians are expected to play the anti-outsourcing card to gain political mileage.

But its not just politicians, who are riding the anti-outsourcing crest, in what is perceived as a more worrying trend, CEOs of large corporations across the US are facing the heat for offshoring and the subsequent job loss.

The outsourcing issue is seen as a part of the larger question about lack of good corporate governance that has been boiling over in the US for some time now.

"CEOs are being held responsible for bad decision making and the job losses in the industry. There is increasing political and trade union pressure on the top officials of large US corporations which will impact any decision made by them concerning outsourcing of jobs," said Steven Clemons, executive vice president of the New America Foundation.

The US economy has lost close to 3 million jobs since 2000, its biggest and longest in job market slump in a long time, but economists from the country see the job market turning around post-November 2004.

"A recovery in the economy will be followed by a recovery in the job market and with an improvement in the domestic job scenario the noise aginst outsourcing will slowly die down," said Daniel Griswold, associate director of the Cato Institute.

With unemployment insurances of over 2 million American workers set to expire this year, outsourcing will remain a major moot point for the US congressmen and trade unions till December 2004.