Thomas J. Donohue

Washington :U.S. Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Thomas J. Donohue has defended outsourcing of tech jobs to India, saying the current backlash is not based on facts but on emotions and politics.

Addressing a press conference here, Donohue, who has just returned from India, said the debate over outsourcing has generated more heat than light because even experts do not know precisely how many U.S. jobs have been or will be outsourced overseas. “Yet under any estimate or forecast, these jobs amount to a small fraction of our nation’s 138 million workforce,” he added.

He said first of all increases in productivity, the recent economic downturn, domestic business impediments and the continued uncertainty were the primary reasons for recent job losses in the U.S. and the slow pace of hiring, not the movement of work overseas to India and other countries.

Donohue mentioned how he was impressed with the workforce India has in the high-tech industry. “Those manning call centers are all graduates with a very high degree of technical qualifications. India has a pool of 23,000 technology experts. But we lack such a pool of talented workers in the U.S..”

Donohue said he had met the Indian leaders “despite their preoccupation with the elections” and had a long meeting with the prime minister’s national security adviser Brajesh Mishra. “We discussed economic issues of significance to India and how power companies have to be rationalized,” he said.

Donohue said by the year 2010 “we will not have a shortage of jobs, but rather a shortage of workers. We must expand the pool of available workers through education, training, immigration, and flexible workplace in order to generate sufficient economic growth and the necessary tax base to support the coming avalanche of retirees”.

In this context, he emphasized how important it was for the U.S. to tackle the serious slippage in education. “Mathematics, science and other important subjects are the tools that we need to arm our students with to become the future workforce of this country,” he said.

He emphasized that to create jobs it was critical that America remainedto the worldwide economy — where 95 percent of its potential customers live.

Isolationist measures designed to restrict trade and punish companies for outsourcing must be defeated, he said.

Referring to the pending state legislation and the ongoing campaign against outsourcing, Donohue warned that the U.S. would end up paying a heavy price if it enacted laws to halt the movement of jobs.

The impact of outsourcing on U.S. jobs had been overstated, he felt. Even the projected flight of 3.3 million jobs by 2015 would be a small percentage of an economy that employs 138.3 million, he said.