Jim Fusco spends five hours a day commuting between his job as a systems analyst in Garden City, N.Y., and his home in East Brunswick, N.J. But after 18 months of unemployment and running through $15,000 in savings, Fusco is happy to have a job, even one that pays $15,000 less than his old position as a programmer for IBM's global services division in New Jersey. Fusco, 50, was one of 127 IBM employees in that division whose job was moved to Canada in May 2002.

"We saw the work going offshore," Fusco said. "It's funny, you try to hang on as best you can, you sort of don't believe it's going to happen to your project, that it's too big or too complicated, but eventually it did."

The offshore outsourcing of high-tech, software and service jobs to nations with lower labor costs is making many American workers anxious these days. With estimates of as many as 3.3 million service industry jobs moving offshore by 2015, their anxiety is understandable. To date, the U.S. government has not offered any help to nonmanufacturing workers whose jobs move offshore, but that may change. Bills introduced in both houses of Congress in early March would extend benefits to these workers. In the meantime, Fusco and 34 other computer programmers have filed a class-action lawsuit against the Department of Labor seeking help under the federal Trade Adjustment Assistance program. The lawsuit and legislation are an attempt to force the nation to compensate the losers in global trade.

"Public policy dictates that programmers should be given retraining when they bear the burden of free trade policies," said Michael G. Smith, an attorney in Washington who is representing Fusco and his co-plaintiffs. "When we have the kind of structural changes that we currently have, programmers shouldn't have to bear the burden on their own backs."

Created in 1962, the federal Trade Adjustment Assistance program provides job training, tuition assistance, health insurance tax credits, job search and relocation reimbursements, and extended unemployment benefits -- up to 104 extra weeks -- to workers who have lost their jobs because of global trade. Last year, funding for the program was tripled to $1.3 billion, according to testimony by the U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick. But the program remains limited to manufacturing and agricultural workers. Eligibility is based on whether a worker's company produces a tangible commodity or "article." The government's current position is that software does not qualify.

Fusco, who sought but was denied benefits under the program, believes the government's distinction is arbitrary and outdated. The lawsuit argues that the definition of "article" in fact already includes software.

"The U.S. is becoming more of a service economy. At the time the law was written, it was meant to address the plight of manufacturing workers," he said. "I believe the intent of the law was to protect any workers whose job goes overseas. It really needs to be updated to reflect the current economic situation in this country."

Many labor economists agree.

"I see no reason why manufacturing workers should be given this special treatment which is being denied people in services," said Ashok Deo Bardhan, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley who co-authored a recent study identifying 37 types of occupations at risk from offshore outsourcing. The list included legal and stock market research, medical transcription services, payroll and other "back office" activities.

What makes these jobs particularly vulnerable, Bardhan and his co-author Cynthia Kroll found, is their lack of face-to-face contact with customers, their ability to be performed remotely via the phone and Internet, and low wage scales in destination countries like India, China, the Philippines and Malaysia. The average salary range of a programmer in India, for example, is $5,880 to $11,000, compared with $60,000 to $80,000 in the United States. At-risk jobs they identified total 14 million, suggesting that the 2002 Forrester Research prediction that 3.3 million service jobs would move offshore by 2015 may be conservative.

"This is not your father's unemployment anymore," said Howard Rosen, an economist who helped write the 2002 amendments to the Trade Adjustment Assistance program. "There's a shift in who is losing their jobs. Before, it was the guy in Detroit. Now, it's the guy who lives next door or the guy you went to college with," he said. Despite much discussion of including service workers in the 2002 reforms, it never happened, Rosen said, because of fears the program would balloon in size.

From June 30, 2002, to June 30, 2003, the program provided benefits to 68,568 workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. "It's covering just an infinitesimal share of American workers who've been laid off," said Robert E. Scott, a senior economist at the institute. Of the 2.7 million jobs lost over the past three years, only 300,000 are from outsourcing, according to Forrester Research.

Rosen, now executive director of the Trade Adjustment Assistance Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group, believes the current focus on job loss and outsourcing, along with sluggish job growth, have renewed momentum in Congress for extending the program to service workers.

The proposed legislation would cover three categories of service workers affected by global trade. First, it would cover workers who lose their jobs because of competition from imported services -- a truck driver, for example, whose job evaporates because his company loses routes to a Mexican trucking concern. It also would cover workers who lose their job when a service relocates overseas -- to a call center in India, to cite a familiar example. Finally, it would cover secondary workers who provide services to a primary firm whose workers are eligible for benefits.

The legislation is gaining support, said Lars Anderson, spokesman for Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., one of the sponsors of the House measure, which has 50 co-sponsors. The Senate bill, sponsored by Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., has 24 co-sponsors. Zoellick, the U.S. trade representative, hinted in testimony at a March 11 congressional hearing that the Bush administration may back the measure.

In the meantime, Fusco and the other plaintiffs are pursuing their case against the Labor Department, since new legislation would not provide retroactive relief to workers already hurt by offshore outsourcing. An initial decision from the U.S. Court of International Trade, which is hearing the case, is expected by late summer, attorney Smith said.

Proponents of extending benefits to workers like Fusco said that one way or another, the country must come to terms with the changes taking place in the economy.

"U.S. workers are under more pressure today than ever before, and this pressure is not temporary," Rosen said. "This is a new reality, and we are going to have to make sure everyone has the appropriate skills to be able to move from job to job."

For his part, Fusco is considering training to become an X-ray technician as a hedge against future job loss. It is one profession, Fusco said, that cannot be shipped offshore because it requires a direct physical presence. "Any job that can be done remotely is at risk," he said.

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