HAVE DATA, WILL TRAVEL

The American Airlines 727 that lands each morning at Grantley Adams International Airport in Barbados carries not only vacationers but also an impressive load of paperwork. In order to cut costs on the processing of passenger ticket-coupons collected at its boarding gates, American flies daily an average of 1,100 lbs. of documents to the balmy island. In Barbados, some 500 computer keypunch operators employed by Caribbean Data Services, a subsidiary of the airline, transfer the ticket information to magnetic tape. The electronic data are then beamed by satellite to American's central computer in Tulsa. Despite extra expenses like the cost of transmitting the data by satellite, the overseas operation saves money for the airline. The main reason: Barbados data processors are paid $2.20 an hour, much less than the $9 that American used to pay its U.S. keypunch operators to do the same work. American Airlines is one of a growing number of U.S. firms that are transferring white-collar work to Barbados, Jamaica and other locales abroad. Statistics on the trend are hard to come by, especially since many U.S. firms are eager to conceal the increasing extent of their foreign data-processing, engineering and computer activities. According to Harley Shaiken, a professor of information technology at the University of California at San Diego who has studied the phenomenon, such white-collar transfers amount to perhaps no more than the equivalent of 15,000 jobs right now. But more and more of this work is beginning to wend its way to the Caribbean, parts of Asia and other literate regions where intellectual skills are for hire at relatively low cost. In Dallas, for example, Pacific Data Services has been subcontracting computer work for clients since 1981 to data centers in the People's Republic of China. PDS boasts that although some of the Chinese workers do not understand English, they copy the information so carefully that the company can guarantee a 99.95% accuracy rate in the electronic processing of professional journals, economic statistics, industry records and other texts. While the salary and benefits for an American employee doing equivalent work might be $12 an hour, the Chinese workers earn about $4 a day. Some U.S. firm, have long used foreign data centers to supplement their labor force for one-time tasks. In 1972, Boston-based John Hancock Insurance hired Key Universal, in Connecticut, to computerize more than 10 million documents, some dating back as far as half a century ago. Key Universal subcontracted the job to workers in Grenada, who labored for twelve months to transfer the information to magnetic tapes. Foreign concerns are becoming more aggressive in seeking clients for their sophisticated wares. In Ireland, the government's development agency has targeted international services as a high-priority area for attracting foreign firms to the country. Compucorp, a California-based information-services company, is able to hire Irish programmers and computer engineers for about one-third the $50,000 annual salary that they would command in the U.S. The company now employs 66 people in Ireland. Irwin Cohen, president of Virginia- based ILM Corp., a data-processing firm, points out that ILM's Jamaican subsidiary was founded in 1964 to meet a shortage of American computer operators. Now, he says, operating in Jamaica is ''very similar to operating in a small U.S. town.'' Very similar, but not the same.