Unions seeks Europe-wide offshoring enquiry

In response to last week's announcement that thousands of jobs are being exported from the UK to India, finance sector union Amicus is holding a series of high level meetings with MEPs today in a bid to win a Eoropean enquiry into the practice.

The union will be asking Employment and Social Affairs Committee Chair, Theo Bouwman, to consider commissioning a European Parliament enquiry into the likely impact of offshoring on the European economy - an enquiry that union sources expect to be much more far reaching than the call centre sector study announced by UK Trade and Industry Secretary Patricia Hewitt last week.

Amicus National Secretary for Finance David Fleming said: "France is currently offshoring to Northern Africa and South America; Germany offshores to West Africa and Eastern Europe; Spain offshores to Central America and the Scandinavian countries offshore to Eastern Europe."

Analysts Deloitte Research predicts that two million jobs will migrate from western economies to India by 2008. A massive percentage of which will be skilled business service jobs rather than low skilled labour intensive call centre work.

The meetings are the first stage in building a global campaign that will link MEPs with Indian campaigners in January followed a major Amicus European conference in February.

The meetings have been organised in conjunction with Union Network International (UNI) - the global union for services and skills - which is recognised as a social partner by the European Union. It covers 320 unions in 48 countries representing 1.3 million finance workers.

Mr Fleming added: "We are not asking for walls to put up around Europe. We want to develop a strategy to deal with changing technology and to safeguard against offshore providers who are trying to put the fear of death into finance companies by telling them their share price will go into a tail spin unless they move offshore.

"The USA has already offshored 200,000 finance sector jobs in the last 12 months and 8,500 have left the UK since October. This is a global issue and we need global solutions.

"Europe has a massive role to play in helping emerging economies and we applaud any company with a commitment to Corporate Social Responsibility at home and abroad."

In a further offshoring development, it was reported today that some legal secretary jobs are to be carried out in India - in a move that could drastically cut the production cost of legal documents and that places thousands of these skilled secretarial jobs in the UK at risk.

The Law Society said that any concerns about confidentiality remained the responsibility of the law firm that was outsourcing the work.

(SP)