KPO threat to US

Increasingly, skilled professional jobs are being sent abroad, including some in architecture, accounting, law, publishing, finance and insurance. For example: Fidelity National Financial of Jacksonville, Fla., is looking for tax processors in India. Intelliways, an Indian company that's working on behalf of a U.S. Internet firm, wants someone there to write news releases. India's Cactus Communications Pvt. Ltd. seeks someone in Asia to edit complex English-language research papers on topics in nuclear physics, astrophysics and particle physics for U.S. and other foreign clients.

With more than three million jobs projected to be shipped overseas in the next decade, many analysts question what this means for future U.S. competitiveness. "Any professional service that can be boiled down to predictable steps, even if they are complicated steps, is now exportable to South Asia," said Robert Reich, who was the secretary of labor in the Clinton administration. "We have to understand there is no longer any sharp distinction between manufacturing and services." Broadly defined, the services sector now employs eight of every 10 American workers.

When global trade eroded U.S. manufacturing jobs in the 1980s and '90s, experts said the U.S. economy was making the transition to a service economy. Now that sector doesn't feel so safe anymore. "Labor has always been a commodity, but it has never been so fungible, so easy to move," said Clyde Prestowitz, the director of the Economic Strategy Institute, which challenges free-trade assumptions, and the author of the recent book Three Billion New Capitalists. It concludes that China and India will threaten U.S. job security. When the American Institute of Architects surveyed its members last year, it found that 11 percent had shipped some design work overseas and an additional 14 percent were considering it.

"I was a little bit surprised that it was that high; 25 percent had at least thought about it," said Kermit Baker, the institute's chief economist. Of those who had shipped some work overseas, a quarter cited lower costs, another quarter cited faster production, and 50 percent of the architectural firms polled said offshoring helped them cover peak demand, allowing round-the-clock work on projects. Most of it is computer-aided design work, traditionally done by junior architects. Lawyers look for help abroad, too. A poll published Dec. 1 by the American Lawyer magazine found that 77 percent of the top 200 U.S. law firms use contract lawyers on a temporary basis, with 6 percent contracting to lawyers offshore "When I saw that, my eyes popped out.