Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) publishes misleading and dishonest article on offshoring
By: relawson
Published On: 1/8/2007 8:49:25 PM
An article titled "How the Technology Sector Adapts to Offshoring" recently published on the DLC website is not only factually wrong, I believe it to be intentionally misleading because it claimed IT job growth while failing to mention IT job loss. It cherry picked data.
The DLC is largely comprised of Democrats who I consider part of the "old guard" - The Democrats who unapologetically supported NAFTA and other unfair trade agreements which later resulted in the loss of countless American jobs.
The article was written by a former Commerce department employee who now works in the IT industry. The affiliation with both Commerce and the IT industry is not unusual - the current president of the leading IT lobbyist group (the ITAA) is the former head of the Office of Technology Policy - which is under the Commerce Department. As a side note, Jim Webb's opponent in the primaries - Harris Miller - was the former President of the ITAA and he also had an unholy alliance with Commerce. They are famous for presenting wrong information - such as in 2000 when the predicted 2,000,000 IT jobs would be created. Instead, job growth since 2000 has been slightly down.
The article correctly claims that "occupations like software engineers experienced an amazing 27 percent increase in overall employment." Although the BLS reports what at first glance seems like rapid growth in Software Engineering jobs, it reports an even GREATER loss in programming jobs. The fact that this information was omitted from the article is simply dishonest. What is even more troubling is that the DLC continues to give credibility to the corporate sponsored "research".
In the year 2006 software occupations lost a net of 34,000 jobs in the United States. At the time this article was published, the author had access to more recent data (Q3 2006) yet chose to rely on 2005 data. The levels that these so-called researchers will stoop to is just amazing.
Depicted below is a chart depicting true job growth as of Q3 2006 in software occupations, as stated in data provided by the BLS. The 2006 data can be downloaded here, and my complete Q1 2006 IT Jobs Report can be downloaded here. In there you will find links to the actual BLS data and proper citations.
As a note, I will be releasing a 2006 report shortly and the latest statistics (an aggregate of all 4 quarters) shows a loss of 34,000 total software jobs as opposed to the 93,000 depicted below. I don't want to appear to be releasing misleading information as the author published on the DLC website has done. I simply have not had time to release an update report because I just received the 2006 data last week.
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