If Karl Marx were writing the Communist Manifesto today he would have included a chapter about offshore outsourcing.  It is one thing to be laid off as part of the constant revolutionizing of production, but it is something else to train your replacement who is in this country on a visa.

An IT employee who must train his/her replacement as the final step to unemployment is probably dealing with a sinking feeling, or as Marx wrote: All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.

This takes us to the latest story about this (Hat tip to the Job Destruction Newsletter [1]): Foreign Workers Could Be Replacing Charlotte Bank Employees [2] by WSOC Television Inc., in Charlotte. The story is built on the report by a Wachovia employee who says he is training his replacement.

The question that needs to be asked, pointedly, is this: Are U.S. government visa policies facilitating the transfer of jobs overseas? Is the H-1B visa the lubricant of the offshore engine?

If this question comes up, the answers by visa proponents are at the ready. They will argue that the number of workers displaced by offshoring is microscopic compared to the overall labor force. But their overarching defense of offshoring is that it reduces costs, improves productivity, increases investment and creates jobs – despite being a little uncertain, at this point in history, just what those new, high-paying jobs will be. (The Wall Street Journal’s Numbers Guy points out that sometimes the numbers used in defense [3] of offshoring make little sense.) 

And what would Marx do? You can bet that Marx’s vision of a worker paradise, updated for our time, would have included the People’s Offshore Development and Maintenance Center, your bourgeois alternative. Or, better yet, just look at China's public-private model. Private companies are building an offshore development industry thanks, in part, to substantial government incentives.

If the H-1B cap is hiked, will more U.S. workers, citizens and permanent residents be forced to train their foreign replacements? If the cap isn't raised will Indian firms, in particular, be forced to expand their U.S. work forces? The offshore firms -- and their customers -- want to avoid both outcomes because of the impact on margins and  public relations.

As business processes and technology are increasingly standardized, offshoring firms will be able to offer, at the ready, processes capable of quickly forklifting a business unit overseas. The need for direct retraining by U.S. employees may be offset by this. But that’s a story for another day. Regardless of how this turns out, for some U.S. workers that sinking feeling will remain.