Outsourcing/offshoring: it’s everywhere

Crooked Timber: Outsourcing; welcome to the world

‘Multinational corporations are faithless and fickle and will move on to the next source of low-cost labour as quick as you can say ‘globalisation’.’ [ . . . ] Other countries have lived for years with the risk that that the big IT firm they attracted to their spanking new industrial park (having won a bidding war against Glasgow, Lodz and Bratislava) will up sticks before even paying their negotiated rate of lower corporation tax. Entire national economies are structured according to the roll of the dice, or the simple luck to be in the right place at the right time and have a relatively cheap, eager, English-speaking workforce. But every European finance minister is looking over her shoulder for the next upstart country with a pocket full of structural funds and a crazy dream to be the next tiger economy. That’s just life.

Interesting read, with a lot of comments (very high comment to post ratio at CT).

So what are the “safe” (ie, only as portable as *you* want to be) careers?