The outsourcing issue may soon explode upon the political scene. As an indicator, an executive of Forrester Research, an independent technology research company in Cambridge, Mass., told Lou Dobbs of CNN the other night that businesses are making a mad dash to outsource as many jobs as possible before any kind of political fallout leads to legal restraints.

Forrester has increased its estimate of how many US services jobs will go offshore in the near term ? about 250,000 in the next few years.

Long term, it is predicting 3.3 million jobs will be offshore by 2015.

Dobbs has been crusading against outsourcing on his show for more than four months.

Meanwhile, although my column didn’t bring in any response from elected state officials about what the state is going to do about outsourcing its work paid for by our tax dollars, I did get a very interesting response from a company trying to do something about the situation.

Mark Jennings, 42, vice president, and co-founder of a company based in California called Synergroup Systems, tells us that he has developed a sensible business model to help both companies caught in the global economy crunch and saving jobs for Americans.

Out in California, by the way, there is legislation in the works that if passed would prevent companies from outsourcing computer material dealing with health-care and legal material.

Jennings says he, too, agrees that any firms with contracts using public funds should be banned from outsourcing.

Last week, I suggested a widespread law that would prohibit such, and if a company had to get a waiver, say from the Labor Department, it would have to provide training for Americans to get those jobs back.

read the full story:
http://www.epcommunitynews.com/archives/2004/bc052104.htm