US government developing data to track US jobs lost overseas

Yahoo! News. By Deborah Lagomarsino, of Dow Jones Newswires.

WASHINGTON, 16 -(Dow Jones)- The U.S. Commerce and Labor Departments are in the process of developing new data to start tracking the number of U.S. jobs lost when firms outsource jobs overseas.

"We simply don't have good measures of what is going on," U.S. Commerce Undersecretary for Economic Affairs Kathleen Cooper told Dow Jones Newswires late Friday.

Commerce has been in discussions with the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics about coming up with a way to measure a job shift that is attracting increasing attention from policy-makers and lawmakers.

"What we're trying to measure is how many layoffs in the U.S. are the result of companies moving jobs overseas," said Cooper, chief economic advisor to Commerce Secretary Don Evans.

In the last three years employers have slashed more than 3 million private- sector jobs. Some economists worry that a chunk of the job losses are structural and will never return. These fears have been fanned by the growing trend of U.S. firms to outsource jobs overseas to cut costs.

"We'll all make better policy discussions if we have a better and clearer sense of how large this phenomenon is, relative to the size of our job market and relative to the turnover in our job market," Cooper said.

"It's imperative that we have some real firm sense of what the impacts are," she said.

Commerce had considered asking a consulting firm for assistance, but concluded working with the Bureau of Labor Statistics was the best approach.

"In the end, the right answer is to try to work with the BLS and they have come to that conclusion as well," Cooper said.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., sent a letter Friday to Evans and Labor Secretary Elaine Chao expressing concern that the outsourcing of U.S. jobs offshore may be causing an overstatement of U.S. productivity, which has been surging.

Schumer asked Commerce and Labor for their views on whether the movement of U.S. jobs to low-wage foreign countries is distorting U.S. productivity data. Further, Schumer said he would "strongly support" the creation of a new survey on the job outsourcing trend, noting that there are currently little good data available.

"This phenomenon may be one of the most profound changes in the U.S. economy in our lifetimes," he said.

Spokesmen for Evans and Chao did not have an immediate response to Schumer's letter, but Cooper said Evans and Chao will certainly respond to Schumer's concerns.

"Clearly this is something we need to look at very carefully," Cooper said.

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