The Impact of Offshoring on Employee Attitudes in the UK

In recent years a number of studies have analysed the consequences of offshoring for developed economies in general and for the UK in particular. Nevertheless, there has been relatively little research on how individual workers in the UK respond to offshoring. Watson Wyatt conducted an extensive survey to examine how offshoring changes employee perceptions of job security and attitudes to work. Our analysis shows that even though job security among UK employees seems to be quite high a significant number of respondents feel that it has declined over the last three years. Moreover, both offshoring and layoffs are found to independently impact perceptions of job security. Whilst, offshoring is not seen as an immediate threat by the majority of workers, once an employer has decided to move operations overseas it is likely that its employees' work attitudes will be affected