Despite the best labor market in a generation, Americans remain worried about the future of employment. Lately, the big worry is automation of jobs. Experiments like Amazon Go's cashier-less store will perpetuate this anxiety. Americans perhaps should be more worried about an old-fashioned employment maneuver, however: outsourcing. The tech sector is already leading the way.
Related: 5 global workforce trends to watch in 2018
Outsourcing tech jobs is nothing new. Fairchild Semiconductor, perhaps the foundational company in Silicon Valley, opened its first Hong Kong factory in 1964. Two years later the company had more employees in Hong Kong than in California. Semiconductor production shifted to Asia decades ago, and iPhones are assembled there by Foxconn as well. IBM now has more employees in India than in the U.S.
The tech sector's recent steps in outsourcing were foreseeable. The geography of employment in the U.S. has become too imbalanced, with high-paying technology jobs centered in the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle while the rest of the country has struggled.
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