Are superstar employees about to be offshored?

A Canadian I know has just started work at a bank in the US. He won’t have to move: he’ll work from home in Toronto and keep paying Canadian taxes. He will earn less than he would in the US, but more than in Canada.

An entrepreneur I know in Paris is recruiting staff in the same spirit. After the pandemic hit, he closed his office and laid off many employees. Now he hires graphic designers in South Africa instead of Paris, getting more experienced people at half the price. He won’t go back to recruiting Parisians.

There has been endless talk of remote workers moving from New York or London to Florida or Sussex. In fact, something more radical is happening: high-skilled jobs are being offshored out of superstar cities to the rest of the world. Like so many changes in this pandemic, what began as an emergency response may solidify into permanence.

The trend towards global remote work predated Covid-19, especially in tech. Companies in Silicon Valley and New York, looking for cheap top-class talent, created teams of developers in India and, later, in Latin America. Then, when the virus prompted mass homeworking, people in all sorts of highly paid professions seized the opportunity to offshore themselves. Again, the effect was probably strongest in tech, where most jobs can be done remotely and the workforce is global: about 71 per cent of tech employees in Silicon Valley were foreign-born, calculated The Seattle Times in 2018.

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