Outsourcing: How Worried Are We?

President Donald Trump made keeping jobs in the United States and bringing jobs back a focus of his campaign, and has claimed credit for recent job growth. This message seemed to prove popular during the campaign, but how concerned are Americans about outsourcing, according to the data?

Each year around Labor Day, Gallup updates a battery of questions on people’s attitudes and anxieties about their jobs. When Gallup began asking workers about outsourcing in 2003, only 9% said they were worried that their company would move their job overseas in the near future. 89% said they were not worried. Since then, worry about this possibility has never exceeded 11% in Gallup’s annual surveys. In Gallup’s latest asking, nine in ten were not concerned.

While Americans don’t seem to be worried about losing their own jobs to outsourcing, they are a little more concerned about their fellow workers. 18% in a 2016 AP/GfK poll said they had a close friend or relation who has lost a job because of outsourcing. 80% in a Pew poll said outsourcing had hurt American workers. Only 15% said that it had helped.

For more insights on how Americans view different aspects of their jobs, see the September issue of AEI’s Political Report.