In the not-too-distant future, Mike Emmons believes “there will be no middle class. We are going to be wiped out.”

The 41-year-old father of two was not always such a doom-monger. Until recently he was a £56,000-a-year middle manager for Siemens, the German electronics group, and living the good life in Florida, America’s sunshine state.

“Globalisation wasn’t something I thought a lot about,” says Emmons. “When I looked at the newspaper it was the sports section that I turned to first. These days it’s business and politics.”

Now, from his home office, Emmons is a political activist who is running for Congress. He is the bane of Washington lobbyists and a leading light in a groundswell of opposition against one of the most politically charged developments ever to enter the workplace.

The trend that has thrust Emmons into the limelight goes by the value-free name of “offshoring”. For such a bland name, offshoring is making a big noise. British executives privately fear the trend is about to become political dynamite.

Glaxo Smith Kline’s chief executive, Jean-Pierre Garnier, is more forthcoming: “This emerging structural change in employment patterns represents a significant public-policy challenge for governments and societies, especially in the US and Europe.”

According to Roger Lyons, joint general secretary of white-collar union Amicus and president of the TUC, “unless something is done, Britain could end up a nation of fat cats and hairdressers, with nothing in between”. He says offshoring will hit the British workforce from call-centre staff to senior management.

Forrester, a research firm, reckons 750,000 British jobs will go offshore, including about 50,000 from senior management, over the next decade.

Downsizing — a synonym for mass sackings — was the early 1990s answer to recession. But when that economic downturn ended, back came the jobs.

Offshoring, this decade’s recession problem solver, is different. It involves shipping jobs permanently overseas to countries where labour is cheaper. A cursory glance at Britain’s steel or textile industry shows the effect offshoring has had on manufacturing.

Now the trend is moving steadily up the management ladder, as globalisation and technology make it possible for companies to move white-collar work wherever the costs are lowest.

In America 3m jobs have been lost since 2001. Worried politicians have started to refer to the “coring out” of the American job market. The vast majority of jobs lost were the result of permanent changes in the US economy and are not coming back, according to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

“If this does not stop,” says Emmons, “we are going to end up with a job market that consists of the very rich and the very poor with nothing in between.”