A union group on Thursday unveiled a Web site that lets users identify more than 200,000 US-based companies it says have exported American jobs or lost them because they were hurt by foreign trade.
With hard data on the offshore outsourcing of American jobs sketchy, the Web site launched by the 60-union AFL-CIO and its Working America affiliate attempts to spotlight a hot-button issue that looms in the US presidential election campaign.
"We think that when 200,000 American companies either send jobs overseas or they lose jobs to trade, it's a problem," AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Rich Trumka told a news conference.
"And we think that whenever this word gets out, more people will agree with us than will not agree with us and we'll be able to help get policy (changes)."
The new "Job Tracker" site, available on the Web site of Working America (http://www.workingamerica.org), the AFL-CIO's 700,000-member advocacy group for non-union workers, enables users to search by postal code, industry or company name to pinpoint the firms that have shipped away jobs since 2001.
AFL-CIO officials said sources for the site include data from the US Labour Department, Securities and Exchange Commission filings, business reviews, newspapers and CNN's "Exporting America" list from the "Lou Dobbs Tonight" program.
Although the flight of American jobs to low-wage countries has received much attention, especially in the last few years as higher paying professional jobs have been included, there are no firm statistics on its extent or impact on the economy, in part because employers have been reluctant to provide them.
In it's first stab at tracking jobs that leave the country, the Labour Department's Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) reported in May that 4,633 US workers at large companies were displaced in the first quarter of 2004 because their jobs moved abroad. That was less than 2 percent of the 239,361 workers who lost their jobs in mass layoffs in the period and a fraction of the total US civilian labour force of 147.7 million workers.
But the BLS said it was unable to report displacements for the second quarter "because a high percentage of employers were not able to provide such data."
The AFL-CIO estimates that 2.7 million US manufacturing jobs and 850,000 service jobs were shipped abroad since 2001.