The chart above shows an official count of jobs that have been offshored since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect in January 1994.
In November 1999, U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky and Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji made a trade deal that led to China’s admission into the World Trade Organization (WTO) on November 10, 2001. And offshoring intensified.
The grand total of jobs offshored to date since 1994 is 2.58 million. However, the USA has likely lost many more jobs to offshoring and outsourcing. These statistics are only the jobs actually counted by bureaucrats after a petition was filed by fired workers. The NAFTA bill included support for displaced workers, and the Employment and Training Administration of the US Department of Labor compiles these statistics.
The 2011 total is not yet complete. The number will rise because Congress had cut off funds for the program for most of the year. The funds were restored in October 2011, and the ETA will be catching up on the backlog of petitions.
Once a factory is in place in a country like China, jobs continue to be added there instead of factories in the United States. These jobs won’t show up as being “off-shored”. For example, the Chinese company Foxconn has one facility nicknamed “ipod city” which makes most the components for the Apple’s iphones, ipods, and ipads and that facility alone employs 300k-450k workers. The company employs 1 million workers currently and most of them have jobs making “stuff” that gets shipped to the United States. These workers will not show up in “off-shore” data.
Lamont,
Yes, that’s very true. What also does not get counted are jobs in the community where a factory has closed. If a restaurant closes because the laid-off workers can’t afford to eat out any more, the restaurant workers who lose their jobs are out of luck.
The statistics above are notable mainly because they are the only official stats that our government produces.
Matt