Outsourced jobs mostly stay in America

So it looks like outsourcing isn’t such a threat to American jobs after all, at least for now.

The US Labor Department issued a report on Thursday stating that only a small fraction of jobs lost in the US were lost to overseas workers (see "Outsourcing Causes 9 Pct. of U.S. Layoffs - Govt.").

According to the Labor Department, nine percent of non-seasonal US layoffs in the first quarter were due to outsourcing, but less than a third of the work was sent overseas. "In more than seven out of 10 cases, the work activities were reassigned to places elsewhere in the US," the Bureau of Labor Statistics said in its report on mass layoffs for the January-to-March period.

Of course, I'm not really surprised. As pointed out in J. Bradford DeLong's post and reiterated in my article "Outsourcing will continue to be a threat to jobs", overseas outsourcing is a threat to jobs in the US over the long term, but not necessarily in the short term.