Area Residents Protest Outsourcing Plan

Patchogue resident Frank Sommer has been out of work since November, when he was laid off from his field technician job with Verizon.

Upon hearing that his tax dollars may soon fund a program that could result in more American jobs being outsourced overseas, Sommer - along with several other unemployed Suffolk County residents and U.S. Rep. Timothy Bishop  came out to express his dismay on Aug. 9 in front of the New York State Department of Labor's One-Stop Career Center in Patchogue.

"I'm just trying to provide for my family and any kind of outsourcing really bothers me," Sommer said. "We should take care of the people in our own country first."

Having called the press conference, Bishop lashed out against the United States Agency for International Development, which recently announced a plan to offer free training courses in "business process outsourcing and English language skills … to over 3,000 under- and unemployed [Sri Lankan] students who will then participate in on-the-job training programs with private firms."

"Outsourcing costs the United States between 12,000 and 15,000 jobs a month," Bishop said. "I'm all for the people of Sri Lanka to achieve a better life, but not at the expense of American workers. "

However, USAID officials maintain that this program is part of a larger effort to help the war-torn Sri Lankan people.

"USAID's Public/Private Alliance Program in Northern Sri Lanka will not displace American IT workers," USAID said in a statement. "This post-conflict recovery program in Sri Lanka targets the marginalized, economically depressed population in Jaffna who have spent the last 26 years living through an extremely violent civil war. They have had no exposure to even basic IT technology."

USAID officials also emphasized that the program will concentrate on "fundamental computer skills," not the more advanced Enterprise Java training that some had expressed concerns about.

"The program's goal is to prepare young adults in this very fragile, post-conflict environment to find jobs in the local economy and to build a basic local skills base that will encourage large Sri Lankan companies based in the south and east to invest in this region," the agency said.

But Bishop argues USAID's claim that the initiative will not affect U.S. workers is wishful thinking at best.

"As hard as we are working to jump-start job creation in America, the federal government should not be training anybody to directly compete with American workers, be they IT, communications, sales or any other field," Bishop stated.

It was unclear how much this specific training program would cost taxpayers, but the larger initiative of which it is a part is estimated to cost the agency $9.8 million, according to USAID.

Having sent a letter to USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah, Bishop said if the initiative is not suspended by the time Congress reconvenes in September, he will file legislation to stop the training.

 "I strongly support USAID's mission to provide economic, development and humanitarian assistance around the world in support of U.S. foreign policy goals," Bishop wrote to Shah. "However, I cannot imagine a more wasteful and counterproductive use of taxpayer funds than teaching foreign workers how to better take jobs from American workers."