Offshoring, also known as offshore outsourcing, initially referred to the practice of U.S. businesses contracting with firms beyond U.S. borders to provide services that would otherwise have been performed by in-house employees in white-collar occupations (e.g., computer systems designers and call center operators). However, sending abroad the jobs of workers in blue-collar occupations employed on textile and auto assembly lines, for example, has been taking place for decades. The extension of offshoring from U.S. manufacturers to service providers that became apparent in the past decade has heightened public policy concerns about the extent of job loss and foregone employment opportunities among U.S. workers. This concern is especially pertinent to policymakers at the present time because of the unemployment rate remains high more than three years after the end of the December 2007-June 2009 recession. Despite U.S. firms having moved work outside the country for decades, the short- and long-run labor market implications of offshore outsourcing remain unclear. Some observers claimed that the business practice explained much of the "jobless recovery" from the 2001 recession. Others asserted that the historical link between economic growth and job creation remained intact and, therefore, that the labor market would eventually recover from the short-run downturn in the business cycle. The labor market did in fact recover from the 2001 recession, which provided support for estimates of offshoring alone having accounted for perhaps 3% of net job loss (gross job gains minus gross job losses) early in the 2000s. Some within the public policy community have again asserted that offshoring is contributing to the slow rebound of the labor market from the 2007-2009 recession. While acknowledging that trade and other forms of globalization can cause painful dislocations for those workers who must adjust to changes in the nation's employment structure, many economists agree that it benefits the nation as a whole by enabling firms to sell a greater variety of higher quality products to U.S. consumers at lower prices and by expanding markets for U.S. firms as developing countries increase their demand for U.S.-made goods. Some question whether this scenario applies to services offshoring, however. Milberg et al. suggest that companies engaged in offshoring of service activities may be its chief beneficiaries, using the profits gained from lower input costs to increase dividends to shareholders, raise stock prices through buybacks, and undertake more mergers and acquisitions rather than reinvesting and promoting growth in the U.S. economy. Still others note that the movement of services jobs to other countries may have different implications for the labor market and public policy than the movement of production jobs. Factory workers (e.g., textile machine operators) have predominantly had less than 12 years of schooling or attained at most a high school diploma. Administrative support and professional workers much more often have taken some college courses or obtained at least a bachelor's degree, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The change in the skill (educational) level of jobs being moved abroad has led some to wonder whether the offshoring of service, unlike production, activities will result in college graduates facing a dwindling supply of entry-level jobs that have traditionally served as stepping-stones to higher skilled and higher paying positions. They also question whether the existing trade adjustment assistance programs can satisfactorily meet the needs of comparatively well-educated office workers who lose their jobs to services offshoring. Congress historically has tried to promote U.S. job growth and assist workers who lose jobs through no fault of their own, whether job losses are caused by economic downturns (i.e., cyclical unemployment) or by shifts in the composition of jobs performed in the United States (i.e., structural unemployment). The notion that offshoring depresses job growth in the United States appears to underlie support among some policymakers for measures meant to encourage U.S. firms to expand employment domestically rather than abroad. While some members of the public policy community also support the adoption by other countries of trade and labor policies intended to level the playing field for U.S. companies and workers in the international marketplace, still others advocate for limited government intervention as the best means of promoting economic growth. This report does not attempt to sort through all the issues raised above, some of which are addressed in the above-referenced CRS reports. Instead, it begins by briefly examining the development of outsourcing by U.S. companies to provide context for policymakers grappling with the business practices' latest iteration. It then synthesizes the information (both empirical and anecdotal) released since the early 2000s on offshore outsourcing's impact on U.S. employment to help policymakers evaluate the adequacy of the nation's retraining and income support programs for workers displaced by greater global economic integration. The overseas relocation of manufacturing work predates by decades the recent wave of services offshoring. Major U.S. companies, initially responding to heightened competition from Japanese and European multinational corporations, opened facilities abroad during the 1970s and 1980s that turned out goods formerly produced by comparatively well paid, often unionized U.S. factory workers (e.g., assembly-line workers in the auto industry). In addition, U.S. companies reacted to the back-to-back recessions of the early 1980s by focusing on their core missions and contracting out activities that specialized domestic enterprises could perform more efficiently (e.g., janitorial services). Firms also restructured their operations by outsourcing jobs to employees of temporary help agencies, professional and business services establishments (e.g., accounting firms), and independent contractors located in the United States. The persistence of these changes over time indicates that domestic outsourcing of formerly in-house functions is a permanent reorganization of how work is performed in the United States. The 2001 recession prompted U.S. employers to achieve further efficiencies by taking advantage of technological innovations that minimize the importance of physical distance between companies. The now widespread dissemination of technologies that enable relatively low cost, good quality, and high speed transmission of voice and data communications has allowed U.S. firms to extend offshoring beyond the jobs of workers that produce goods to the jobs of workers that provide services (e.g., writers of software code, processors of credit-card receipts, interpreters of CT scans of U.S. hospital patients, and preparers of corporate financial analyses for U.S. investors). Jobs at risk of being offshored thus are both those held by information technology (IT) workers and IT-enabled workers. Events also transpired in other countries that enhanced their ability to export services—particularly IT services—to the United States and other developed countries. One such event was addressing the so-called Y2K crisis: U.S. firms, in response to a tight supply of computer programmers in the late 1990s, turned to companies principally located in India to make the code fixes needed to avert problems with computer systems when the year 2000 arrived; the domestic firms that utilized these programmers reportedly were pleased with the quality of their work. Another development was the educational systems of low-wage foreign nations graduating an abundant supply of well educated (sometimes English-speaking) individuals. In some cases, the number of persons with IT and accounting skills reportedly exceeded the immediate needs of their local economies (e.g., China, Eastern Europe, India, and the Philippines). With English the language of the computer industry worldwide, IT services can be provided from many non-English-speaking, comparatively low-wage nations (e.g., Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, China, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Jordan, Lithuania, Mexico, Slovenia, Russia, and Ukraine). Taken together, these developments have allowed U.S.-based companies to increasingly fragment tasks across borders in both manufacturing and information and business services. Firms no longer just ship goods between countries. They can now also locate intangible production tasks, such as research, design, management, and IT support across a number of different countries. Relatedly, research suggests that the extension of task fragmentation to service activities accounts for the greater relative contribution of offshoring to increased wage dispersion (inequality) in the United States in recent decades. Technological change and deunionization appear to have accounted for relatively more of the so-called polarization of wages that occurred during the 1980s and 1990s. No database exists that provides a comprehensive answer to the question of how many workers have lost their jobs to offshoring. The only data available on jobs lost to the out-of-country relocation of work come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' (BLS's) series on extended mass layoffs. Since 2004, BLS has asked firms with at least 50 employees that let go at least 50 workers in layoffs that lasted 31 or more days whether the firms moved the laid-off workers' jobs out of the United States. Given the series' exclusion of small companies and focus on large layoffs, it underestimates jobs lost to offshoring and is better at picking up losses at manufacturers than at service providers. Not surprisingly, then, the BLS series has consistently found that relatively few job losses result from the movement of work away from the United States. In the third quarter of 2012, when more than 100,000 workers were separated in extended mass layoffs, firms told BLS that they let go fewer than 1,600 workers in actions involving the movement of work and that less than 1% of these workers had their jobs moved to another country. As a result of the dearth of data, some have stepped in to provide more information on the extent of offshoring today and in coming years. Forrester Research, Inc. was the source of perhaps the first and most commonly cited statistics on offshoring of service sector jobs.