(CBS) This is the 15th in a month-long series of reports called "Making Ends Meet" about how families are coping with the tough economy, unemployment and smaller retirement accounts.

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When Jean Shaw gets together with her co-workers in Terre Haute, the talk is all about the future: a future they never imagined.

"Where am I going to get a job paying a decent wage at 56 years old? Where can I start over?" asks Shaw.

Shaw and her three co-workers are watching their jobs at the mail-order company Columbia House disappear, the latest casualties of a corporate trend called outsourcing.

Shaw has worked for the company 27 years, Janice Alsip is going on 34, Sue Treash has been there 26 and Faye Johnson just completed her 29th year.

They all worked in the returns department until the company began sending jobs packing.

Some two years ago "they started outsourcing the e-mails to India, the correspondence to Panama and a lot of those ladies have lost their jobs," says Shaw.

Then, as CBS News Correspondent Jane Clayson reports, the entire returns department was outsourced and reassigned to entry-level jobs.

"Now, I dread going into work everyday," says Treash.

"It's been really difficult because we used to work for a company that seemed like it really cared about us," says Alsip. "It's really depressing, it really is."

Columbia House executives refused to explain why they're farming out so many jobs, but the practice of outsourcing is not uncommon. In fact, one study shows 3 million jobs leaving this country in the next decade.

"You can't blame companies," says former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich. "These companies are in intense competition these days (and) the easiest way to show profits is to cut labor costs."

But Reich warns there are long-term losses in that short-term profit making.

"The fact is we're losing our middle class, our manufacturing workers, the low-level, middle-level white-collar workers," says Reich.

Many of the jobs go to countries like India, where companies pay pennies on the dollar for highly skilled workers.

IBM managers recently warned their colleagues to be ready for a backlash from displaced workers as more American jobs go.

The big question, says Reich, is "Who is going to buy all of the goods and services produced by American companies when so many people are finding that their jobs are so precarious?"

This week Johnson got a termination notice and Alsip got a warning.

To think about those jobs that are going to less-skilled, cheaper labor makes Shaw feel "unimportant, discarded and sad to think that not just Columbia House and not just this community, but the whole United States is on this path."

A path that's leading millions of workers to the unemployment office and raising questions no one can answer.

"How are we going to survive?"

© MMIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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