By GREGORY N. HEIRES

Natasha Humphries, 31, enjoyed a $90,000 a year job as a software engineer for the Palm handheld computer maker in California.

But then she became a victim of an ugly side of globalization — the outsourcing of U.S. jobs to other countries, where companies are able to pay vastly lower wages.

Discarded by her employer, after she was ordered to train her own replacement workers thousands of miles away in India, Ms. Humphries was thrown into the ranks of the unemployed. She lost the company-provided health-insurance plan that had covered her 6-year-old child, who has sickle-cell anemia.

“I was told repeatedly before training the Indian team in Bangalore that my job was safe,” Ms. Humphries said. “Then I got laid off.” Recently, Ms. Humphries joined 50 other workers on the AFL-CIO’s nationwide “Show Us the Jobs” bus tour, which called public attention to President Bush’s dismal jobs record — the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Outsourcing has become a hot-button political issue partly because of the presidential race this year. Manufacturing jobs have been one of our nation’s major exports for many years. But the rising outcry also reflects an intense concern that shipping white-collar jobs abroad represents a new long-term threat to our standard of living and the employment prospects of our children and grandchildren.

When $90,000-a-year workers are dumped, no job is safe.

In the public sector, states and localities haven’t yet directly replaced huge numbers of employees with foreign workers. But contractors hired with public funds are offshoring work out of the country as fast as they can.

More than 40 states have contracts with companies — including J.P. Morgan — that are exporting computerized food stamp service jobs to countries such as Mexico and India, according to DC 37’s parent union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. AFSCME and other unions are backing legislation in statehouses around the country, including New York, to ban companies from using public funds to send work offshore.

Any job that doesn’t require face-to-face con-tact is up for grabs. Computer-based jobs are particularly at risk. India, for example, has a highly educated, English-speaking workforce paid a fraction of what U.S. workers receive. Since 2000, India has increased its employment of workers who provide information technology and other services to overseas customers from 152,000 to 505,000, according to the National Association of Software and Service Companies of India and the U.S. Commerce Dept.

By the end of the decade, the number of manufacturing and white collar jobs moved overseas will increase from 300,000 a year to 600,000, according to economist Mark Zandi of Economy.com, a research firm in West Chester, Pa. The Bush administration is under fire for supporting tax policies that encourage U.S. companies to move work abroad. Since 2001, when Mr. Bush took office, U.S. companies and their subsidiaries have shipped up to 1 million jobs overseas, according to Goldman Sachs.

In February, N. Gregory Mankiw, chair of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors, was forced to apologize for speaking favorably about outsourcing when the White House released its annual report on the economy. “Outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade,” he said. “More things are tradable than were tradable in the past. And that’s a good thing.”

The administration may have believed Mr. Mankiw’s apology could mask its support for free-trade policies that promote profits at the expense of American jobs. But Treasury Secretary John Snow exposed that lie by backing outsourcing during a March visit to Ohio. “You can outsource a lot of activities and get them done just as well, or better, at a lower cost,” he said.

The quarter million Ohio workers whose jobs have disappeared overseas since 1999 did not receive Mr. Snow’s remarks warmly. And job exports are becoming one of the top issues moving voters into the Kerry column for the November presidential election.