Would a government-commissioned report with a non-rosy view of outsourcing have influenced the 2004 election if it had been released in, say, July 2004, when it was ready? That's one of the underlying questions in a story in Manufacturing & Technology News, which has been trying to get the report through the Freedom of Information Act. The trade paper says, "After the November election, a draft of the report prepared by a 'braintrust' of Technology Administration analysts went into a vetting process among political appointees at the Commerce Department and White House. It never resurfaced. The analysts never received any feedback on their work, which is unusual, say those who have written similar reports."
As far as I can find out, there's been no mainstream, non-trade coverage of the non-appearance of the original report, nor of what the MTN finally got for its FOIA request. The bland, 12-page "Six-Month Assessment of Workforce Globalization In Certain Knowledge-Based Industries" report "contains no original research and forsakes its initial intent of providing a balanced view of outsourcing," instead offering "allegedly positive impacts for the U.S. economy." What got left out? MTN says:
[T]wo Technology Administration analysts involved in writing the IT services and software section of the report made a public presentation to the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in December 2004 describing their findings. The 43-page PowerPoint presentation, provided to MTN by those attending a meeting of ACM's Job Migration Task Force, offers a detailed analysis of the trend, including charts on the growth of Indian outsourcing firms and strategies adopted by IBM, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. It also describes the IT jobs that will likely remain in the United States and notes that most overseas IT companies are not doing research. It states that "knowledge work can move offshore more quickly and cheaply than manufacturing," and notes that "companies are moving up the off-shoring learning curve."
The analysts say that there is a "surplus of low-cost, technically skilled labor in other countries" that is taking advantage of the "digitization of work" and standardization of software platforms such as Oracle, Peoplesoft and SAP. Foreign workers have benefited from the "development and adoption of standard IT training programs and skill certification." A large Indian-American IT business community is "tapping [the] low-wage Indian workforce...Offshoring destination nations [are] expanding technical workforce skills training." They noted that venture capitalists are encouraging IT start-ups to use offshore software developers to reduce their cash burn rates. And that there is "growing pressure in corporate America to offshore IT work." There is also "political pressure to stem the flow of jobs."
So a politically hot report about outsourcing gets sat on and de-sexed, and the press doesn't notice? Although a lot of university types were involved in the original research and analysis, this isn't just an academic issue. "How does one position one's economy and one's educational system, particularly at the university level, to make sure that you can continue to add value at a sufficient level to keep you as an advanced developed country?" MTN quotes one of the scientists involved. "The United States seems to be treating this even more cavalierly than it treated the relocation of manufacturing, which has been very important for the rise of China as a new global superpower."