At the Strategic Research Institute’s conference this week on offshore outsourcing, experts and executives are offering their insights on how companies can save money by farming certain jobs overseas.

Outside the Westin Times Square in New York, where the conference is taking place, some people are expressing a totally different view. They’re focused on saving jobs and stopping what they feel is the familiar “great sucking noise” coming from the opposite side of the ocean.

Protesters from at least seven workers’ organizations are involved — rallying against offshore outsourcing and the loss of U.S. jobs to cheaper overseas labor. It’s a trend that will claim one in 20 IT jobs by the end of this year, according to analysis firm Gartner Inc.

“We don’t want to cause a massive problem,” said Fred Tedesco, co-founder of Waterbury, Conn.-based MAD in the USA, one of the groups that organized the protest. “We’re not going to stop traffic or stop people from going in. Our goal is to put multinational companies on notice and educate the American public.”

“We’ve had IT firms in Connecticut that offered to beat foreign firms by a dollar and were told no,” said John Bauman, president of Meriden, Conn.-based TORAW (The Organization for the Rights of American Workers, another organizer of the event. “This tells you the type of competition that’s out there.”

Bauman said that the offshore trend affects not only IT but all workers. Anyone who works at a computer terminal could have his job sent overseas, Bauman said.

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