Every first Monday of September, the United States pauses to recognize something fundamental to its economic history: the value of people and the work they do.
Labor Day traces its roots to the late 19th-century labor movement. The first celebration took place in New York City on September 5, 1882, and in 1894 Congress established the first Monday in September as a federal holiday recognizing the social and economic achievements of American workers.
More than 140 years after that first celebration, the importance of people has not changed. But where teams work, how they collaborate, and how companies access talent have changed dramatically.
Today, a professional in Texas can begin the morning working alongside colleagues in Costa Rica and Colombia, collaborate throughout the same business day, serve the same customers, access the same systems, and operate as part of the same team.
That is part of the promise of nearshoring, and one of the reasons Latin America is becoming increasingly important to the future of the U.S. workforce.
From workforce expansion to workforce strategy
For U.S. businesses, building teams has become an increasingly important economic decision.
Hiring an employee involves much more than salary. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, total employer compensation costs for private-industry workers averaged $46.60 per hour in March 2026, including $32.60 in wages and salaries and another $14.01 in benefits. In professional and business services, total compensation costs were even higher.
At the same time, organizations need specialized talent, flexible capacity and the ability to respond quickly as customer needs change.
The question is therefore no longer simply:
“How do we hire more people?”
Increasingly, it is:
“How do we build the right team, in the right location, with the right operating model?”
Nearshore Labor Services provide one increasingly compelling answer.
Rather than moving operations halfway around the world, U.S. companies can extend their teams into neighboring markets across Latin America, gaining access to skilled professionals while maintaining overlapping working hours, geographic proximity and closer cultural alignment.
The result can be a workforce model designed not only to control costs, but also to improve the way work gets done.
The economic advantage goes beyond lower labor costs
Cost efficiency remains one of the most visible advantages of nearshoring, particularly when compared with building the same capacity entirely within the United States.
But focusing exclusively on salaries misses much of the opportunity.
A well-designed nearshore model can also help reduce the costs and complexity associated with recruiting, onboarding, HR administration, infrastructure, workforce expansion and maintaining additional operational capacity.
Instead of treating those savings as the final objective, companies can use them to reinvest in growth, expanding customer support, strengthening engineering teams, increasing service coverage, accelerating projects or adding specialized capabilities that might otherwise be difficult to justify.
In other words, nearshoring can change the economics of scaling.
The goal is not simply to find less expensive labor. It is to create more operational capability for every dollar invested in the workforce.
And proximity changes how teams operate
The difference between traditional offshore outsourcing and nearshoring is not measured only in miles.
It is often measured in hours.
With teams located in markets such as Colombia and Costa Rica, U.S. organizations can work with professionals whose workdays substantially overlap with their own. Instead of sending a request at the end of one business day and waiting until the next for a response, teams can troubleshoot, meet, escalate issues and make decisions together in real time.
That creates important operational advantages.
Managers can remain closer to their teams. Customers can receive support during U.S. business hours. Technical specialists can join live incidents and meetings. Project coordinators can communicate directly with stakeholders. And distributed employees can participate more naturally in the everyday rhythm of the organization.
Costa Rica, for example, actively positions its qualified, bilingual talent and strategic time zone as advantages for its service economy. The country’s non-travel services exports reached approximately $12.5 billion in 2025, an 8% increase over 2024, with business and technology services among its leading exports.
Colombia is seeing similar momentum. During the first quarter of 2026, the country exported $5.34 billion in services, up 11.3% year over year. Other business services alone generated approximately $875 million during the quarter, growing 11.7%.
These are not simply emerging outsourcing markets.
They are increasingly sophisticated service and knowledge economies connected to global businesses.
Nearshore teams are becoming part of the operation; not outside of it
Perhaps the most important evolution in nearshoring is the shift from transactional outsourcing toward integrated teams.
The old model often began with a task:
Find someone who can do this work.
The modern nearshore model begins with a different question:
How should this capability operate inside our business?
That distinction matters.
At LinkAmerica, our Nearshore Labor Services model is designed around dedicated teams supported by recruitment, HR oversight, leadership, training and operational escalation structures. Our delivery capabilities across Costa Rica and Colombia include areas such as L1–L4 NOC and service assurance operations, service delivery and project coordination, customer operations, engineering, technical support and business continuity.
The objective is not to assemble isolated resources.
It is to build a coordinated service unit that can integrate with the client’s processes, standards and culture.
That includes structured talent acquisition and English-language assessment, defined onboarding processes and continuity mechanisms designed to transfer knowledge and prepare backup capacity before a gap occurs.
This is where the operational value of nearshoring becomes particularly powerful.
When nearshore professionals are treated as an extension of the organization rather than an external pool of contractors, companies gain more than capacity.
They gain continuity, knowledge and scalability.
The Americas have a major opportunity ahead
The growth of nearshoring is also part of a larger economic shift.
The Inter-American Development Bank has estimated that nearshoring could generate as much as $78 billion per year in additional exports of goods and services from Latin America and the Caribbean in the near and medium term. Of that opportunity, approximately $14 billion could come from services.
That potential reflects a broader transformation in how companies think about global operations.
For decades, globalization encouraged organizations to move work wherever costs were lowest.
The next stage may be more nuanced.
Businesses still need efficiency. But they increasingly need resilience, speed, specialized talent, collaboration and flexibility at the same time.
That combination makes the Americas uniquely interesting.
A U.S. company does not necessarily have to choose between a domestic team and a global team.
It can build one team across the Americas.
A different way to think about Labor Day
Labor Day was created to recognize the role workers played in building American prosperity.
More than a century later, the fundamental idea still resonates: businesses grow when they invest in people and create the conditions for them to do their best work.
What has changed is the map.
Technology, connectivity and increasingly sophisticated talent ecosystems across Latin America are making it possible for organizations to build teams that cross borders without sacrificing day-to-day collaboration.
For U.S. businesses, that creates an opportunity to rethink workforce strategy, not by replacing the people who already make their organizations successful, but by expanding what those organizations are capable of achieving.
Nearshore teams can provide additional expertise, operational capacity and scale while allowing companies to remain focused on their customers, innovation and growth.
And perhaps that is one of the most relevant workforce conversations we can have this Labor Day.
Because the future of work may be global, but it can also be much closer than we think.
Build Your Next Team Across the Americas
At LinkAmerica, we help U.S. organizations build and operate dedicated nearshore teams from our service and talent hubs in Costa Rica and Colombia, supported by local recruitment, HR, operational leadership and service governance.
From network operations and engineering to service delivery, project coordination, customer operations and technical support, our Nearshore Labor Services model is built to provide the people, structure and continuity organizations need to scale.
Across the Americas, we connect people, processes and possibilities.
Discover how LinkAmerica Nearshore Labor Services can help your organization build the capacity it needs for what comes next.