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Susceptibility of Pennsylvania Service-Producing Occupations to Offshoring

Offshoring commonly refers to the movement of home-country jobs to another country – whether or not those jobs go to another company. Pennsylvanians who lose their jobs due to offshoring might need to obtain retraining to find new work at a comparable wage. Also, investments in training for entry into jobs that are susceptible to offshoring place social and individual returns to these investments in peril. Contained in this research report is an identification of Pennsylvania’s service-producing occupations that are susceptible to offshoring. Examined are the geospatial distribution and concentration of susceptible Pennsylvania service-producing occupations as well as the relationships of susceptibility to offshoring with education and training required and with occupational wages earned in these occupations. Among all 515 service-producing occupations listed in the Standard Occupational Classification System, 160 service-producing occupations were classified as offshorable by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics in a 2008 study that appeared in Monthly Labor Review. Adopted for the current study was the Bureau’s scoring system for classifying the degree of susceptibility of these 160 occupations to offshoring. The jobs of one-quarter of all Pennsylvanians employed in service-producing occupations during 2009 were susceptible to offshoring. Pennsylvania workers were more likely to hold jobs with the highest risk for offshoring – and less likely to work in jobs with relatively low risk for offshoring – than workers in the entire United States employed in service-producing occupations. Pennsylvania workers with high wages in service-producing occupations held jobs that were less susceptible to offshoring than workers in low wage jobs in these occupations. Jobs in service-producing occupations requiring non-degree training and experience were more susceptible to offshoring than jobs in these occupations requiring associates or bachelors degrees. The numbers and concentrations of jobs susceptible to offshoring in service-producing occupations were dispersed widely among Pennsylvania counties.This report first was presented at the 2010 Pennsylvania Workforce Investment Board Symposium in State College, Pennsylvania, on June 17, 2010.