By Ted Bridis
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Leading technology companies urged Congress and the Bush administration Wednesday not to impose new trade restrictions aimed at keeping U.S. jobs from moving overseas, where labor costs are lower.

The companies said such policies would do little to resolve long-standing problems more broadly affecting America's global competitiveness, such as low-scoring schools and inadequate research spending. Erecting barriers "could lead to retaliation from our trading partners and even an all-out trade war," they said.

The effort shows the industry's growing concerns lawmakers might clamp down on "offshoring" of U.S. jobs during an election year. Already, some Democratic candidates have criticized the practice.

Democratic front-runner Howard Dean said during a debate last month that America needs a president "who doesn't think that big corporations who get tax cuts ought to be able to move their headquarters to Bermuda and their jobs offshore."

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., introduced a bill in November requiring service representatives to disclose their physical location each time a customer calls to make a purchase, inquire about a transaction or ask for technical support.

"There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore," Carly Fiorina, chief executive for Hewlett-Packard Co., said Wednesday. "We have to compete for jobs."

In a report by a trade group for some leading technology companies, executives argued that moving jobs to countries such as China or India - where labor costs are cheaper - helps companies break into lucrative foreign markets and hire skilled and creative employees in countries where students perform far better than U.S. students in math and science.

"Countries that resort to protectionism end up hampering innovation and crippling their industries, which leads to lower economic growth and ultimately higher unemployment," said the Washington-based Computer Systems Policy Project, whose member companies include Intel Corp., IBM, Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard.

Intel chief executive Craig Barrett said the United States "now has to compete for every job going forward. That has not been on the table before. It had been assumed we had a lock on white-collar jobs and high-tech jobs. That is no longer the case."

Barrett complained about federal agriculture subsidies he said were worth tens of billions of dollars while government investment in physical sciences was a relatively low $5 billion. "I can't understand why we continue to pour resources into the industries of the 19th century," Barrett said.

A vocal critic of moving jobs overseas, Marcus Courtney of Seattle, dismissed the latest report.

"This is not a recipe for job creation in this country," Courtney, president of the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, said. "This is a recipe for corporate greed. They're lining up at the public trough to slash their labor costs."