Off-shore and off work: The future of Australia’s service industries in a global economy (2012 update report) – Australian Services Union and the Finance Sector Union
The client’s concern was not just for the jobs being lost but that a “vicious cycle of off-shoring jobs, losing skills and competencies from the domestic economy and as a result losing more jobs off-shore” could become institutionalised.
NIEIR’s research and subsequent modelling showed that as the original 2008 NIEIR report predicted that the pace of off-shoring was likely to continue to grow as new technology made new forms of remote work possible. In 2012 there was evidence that that was the case. The pace at which jobs have been moved off-shore had been roughly in line with the original NIEIR base case (20,000 year) and the proportion of service sector jobs exposed to off-shoring had moved up from 9.7 per cent in 2007 to 10.2 per cent in 2012 (Base Case).
Benefit to client
The update report provided new estimates for the number and type of service jobs to be off-shored and in doing so indentifying jobs at risk. There is evidence that failure to deal with competitiveness of Australia’s services industries is impacting the government’s ambition to move toward being a knowledge-based economy and undermining the significant investment being made in education and training services. The report gave the client a detailed assessment of trends in employment in the service sector and a solid case to argue that national policies should be developed to deal with the socially and economically destructive potential of what was occurring.
