Senator calls outsourcing a fact of life

Sen. Max Baucus, the top Democrat on the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, said last week that outsourcing white-collar jobs to low-wage countries such as India has become a global fact of life -- and that the United States must learn to live with it.

The senator from Montana also called on India to further open its once-tightly closed economy, especially in the agricultural and retail industries, to competition from U.S. companies.

Baucus said a majority of fellow Senate Democrats agreed with him, despite the party's longtime opposition to American companies moving jobs overseas.

``Everybody is concerned about job losses and so am I,'' he told the Associated Press in an interview Friday in Bangalore, his first stop on a five-day tour of India.

``But the world is flat and we must work harder to better retrain our people,'' rather than resist outsourcing, he said. ``Offshoring is a fact of globalization. Opportunities for U.S. companies come from everywhere -- including India.''

In a written statement released later Friday, Baucus said the intent of his trip was to ``try to get at the problem of outsourcing'' and find ways to keep more of the jobs in the United States.

``Any job lost to outsourcing is too many,'' he said. ``But we can't kid ourselves or stick our heads in the sand. . . . Our challenge is to learn why these jobs are moving overseas and work to keep them at home by boosting America's competitiveness through such things as training, education and tax incentives.''