Over the last three months, more than 12,000 people have voted to send Gina Hellegers' job offshore. She tries not to take it personally.
Hellegers is an underwriter at E-Loan Inc., a Pleasanton, Calif.-based mortgage company that has started offering online customers a choice: When they're taking cash out of their homes, do they want the paperwork processed in 10 days overseas or 12 days in the United States?
Nearly 9 in 10 customers choose the overseas option, which means the work is done in Chennai, India.
"They just want their home equity loan as quickly as possible," Hellegers said.
The lopsided result helps explain why many companies, including E-Loan and about half the Fortune 500, continue to move parts of their operations to low-cost areas around the world. Although public opinion polls show Americans are worried about this outsourcing of jobs, few people appear willing to back that up if it means spending more money or more time.
Even those who have lost jobs sometimes express more resignation than outrage. The lack of widespread passion on the subject, some say, helps explain why dozens of measures in Congress and state legislatures for limiting outsourcing have failed to gain much traction.
And the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, who in February characterized executives who outsourced as traitors, lately has toned down his rhetoric on the subject.
Against this backdrop, the nation's unemployment report for April -- to be released Friday -- becomes crucial. A strong report, coming on the heels of March's impressive net gain of 308,000 nonfarm jobs, will diminish remaining incentives to restrain outsourcing.
Sluggish job growth, on the other hand, will conjure up the slack reports of last winter. Outsourcing became a prominent election issue in December after a string of poor job reports sparked fears that U.S. job creation was in a long-term slump.
Opponents of outsourcing aren't sure how they were put on the defensive so quickly.
"It was shocking to find a Democratic-controlled House in the liberal state of Washington could not pass a significant piece of legislation dealing with the offshore-outsourcing issue," said Marcus Courtney, president of the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers. The bill would have prohibited state contracts from being sent overseas.
