Middle Class? What Middle Class?

Newsweek has an ominous article about The Big Squeeze that is coming as middle-income, white collar and skilled blue collar jobs are outsourced overseas. Here's some of what the report calls "calming" information:

Europe is less vulnerable to offshoring than America. Rigid labor laws insulate its workers from pay cuts and layoffs. Still, Deutsche Bank predicts that 2 percent of all service jobs in Germany could move overseas within four or five years. Ian Marriott, head of global-offshoring research for the Gartner Group, says that Nordic companies have been slow to catch on to offshoring and will soon be "at a financial disadvantage to global competitors who come into their markets."

The OECD recently analyzed how many European jobs could be affected by service-sector offshoring. It examined occupational classifications where people use PCs heavily, use the Internet to transfer work, and where the work involves "codified information" (as opposed to "implicit knowledge") and little face-to-face contact with customers. The study found 15 at-risk job categories -- among them clerks and keyboard operators, engineers and architects, mathematicians and statisticians, chemists and physicists -- representing 19 percent of total employment in the EU-15."