Daniel Drezner has an excellent piece in Foreign Affairs about trade and outsourcing. He gets right to the heart of the political and economic issues involved, from the basic problem of widepsread benefits and concentrated costs to the implications this has for political organization.
What he doesn't really deal with is the question of varying workers' rights across countries. These differences seem to be throught of by economists as part of the diversity that leads to gains from trade, even though from an equity standpoint the foreign worker's welfare (especially where foreign workers are exploited, or where they're children) should be an ethical concern. But from an American political perspective, the only effect is that it might shift trade to different kinds of goods or services.
Offshore outsourcing adds two additional political pressures. The first stems from the fact that technological innovation has converted what were thought to be nontradeable sectors into tradeable ones. Manufacturing workers have long been subject to the rigors of global competition. White-collar service-sector workers are being introduced to these pressures for the first time -- and they are not happy about it. As Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales point out in Saving Capitalism From the Capitalists, globalization and technological innovation affect professions such as law and medicine that have not changed all that much for centuries. Their political reaction to the threat of foreign competition will be fierce.So I guess he's also implying that white-collar tech workers are even more likely to organize politically because they are more conversant in the ways of the internet? This seems right, and it validates the sense a lot of people seem to have had that the tech sector is under the biggest pressure from outsourcing to Pune.The second pressure is that the Internet has greatly facilitated political organization, making it much easier for those who blame outsourcing for their troubles to rally together. In recent years, countless organizations -- with names such as Rescue American Jobs, Save U.S. Jobs, and the Coalition for National Sovereignty and Economic Patriotism -- have sprouted up. Such groups have disproportionately focused on white-collar tech workers, even though the manufacturing sector has been much harder hit by the recent economic slowdown.
The big question I have is what these people's political affiliations are and how they're changing; from the way the Bush admin is triangulating its position, maybe we can infer that they're independent to conservative? Just anecdotally, I would have expected them to have pretty libertarian views, which fits with this.
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