More U.S. Jobs Shipped Overseas

(CBS)  The economy is not producing nearly enough jobs to replace the ones that are being lost to a cheaper workforce overseas.

And CBS News Correspondent Anthony Mason reports the job tide is not likely to turn.

Lisa Pineau got the news that her job was being "transitioned" to Toronto in a letter from her boss.

"It's been a real jolt," she said.

A computer programmer in Plano, Texas, Pineau soon discovered she was not alone.

"Everyone I know in and around Dallas is either being off-shored or thinking about it," she said.

Outsourcing consultant Michael Corbett says "off-shoring," the trend to send jobs to low-wage centers like India and China, is now growing 20 percent per year.

"I think we're really in the middle of a very fundamental transformation of business, of work, of careers," he said. "I think we need to assume it's going to be very painful."

It could be both painful and irreversible. With consumers demanding lower prices and investors demanding higher profits, business is under relentless pressure to cut costs.

American workers may be among the most productive in the world, but they also make on average $16 an hour, and benefits add another six bucks on top of that, reports Mason. A foreign worker with comparable skills comes at a fraction of the cost.

"Protecting jobs leads to job destruction, because if we try to prevent outsourcing, it'll just make American business less competitive in the world market. And that will lead to overall job destruction. So for me there's no choice here. We have to outsource," said Marc Andreesen, head of the California-based software company "Opsware," which helps businesses cut costs by automating.

Andreesen says he plans to hire workers in India or Brazil.

"By doing that, what I want to be able to do is get more bang for the buck out of those jobs, so that I can grow faster and so I can hire more people in the U.S.," he said.

Ironically, in this global shift, some Indian companies are now even off-shoring their jobs to China, which means the tech job Lisa Pineau lost is going so far away, it's probably never coming back.

"It's just left a sour feeling in my stomach," she said.

After more than a year of looking, Pineau is thinking about buying a sandwich shop.