The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
With oil and gas jobs in demand, will workers return?
Industry worries that it won’t have workforce it needs.
Zach Scott was a year old and his brother was still in the womb when their dad got laid off from Halliburton in 1986, the year after oil prices tanked and ushered in the largest industry downturn until, some argue, the current one.
Within two years, 20 percent of the workers in the oil and gas industry had lost their jobs. Many of them did not return and they discouraged their children from going into the industry — creating a generational gap that is now coming home to roost.
Scott’s father did neither of those things. He kept coming back to the oil and gas fields, despite the multiple layoffs that used to count as battle scars for industry veterans.
Cautiously, things appear to be turning up again, leaving companies scrambling for workers and wondering if those they have let go will return. If those former employees don’t come back, will the industry known for bluster, swearing and endless hours away from home be able to recruit the hotshot smarts it needs to move forward?
At the end of each cycle, about 30 percent of the workers who lose their jobs don’t come back, said Tony Angelle, a vice president with Halliburton. His company is thinking about ways to attract talent now that activity is picking up again after a two-year slump.
They “don’t want anything to do with the oil and gas business,” he said at the Developing Unconventional Gas East conference in Pittsburgh in June.
Another fraction of the former workforce comes back reluctantly, still bitter about having been laid off, he said.
There are people who fall in love with the business and never want to leave, said Jared Oehring, vice president of technology with U.S. Well Services. But if the business — cycles and all — is to be made worthwhile for more than just the die-hards, the tradition of oilfield culture needs an upgrade.
“If times are tough and supervisors are yelling and cursing, like the old-school oil business,” it will repel many workers, Oehring said.
As oil and gas companies are starting to negotiate what work-life balance means in the context of their business, even those that choose to remain are thinking differently about their work. Scott is a case in point. Just out of high school in the northern Pennsylvania county of Bradford, his father got him a job at the wash bay of Superior Well Services. It paid $7.25 an hour, $2 more than his gig at the local cemetery.
Zach Scott took the job and went on thinking he was going to be a science teacher. Washing trucks turned into an internship doing lab work, then work in the field — logging, blending cement, coor- dinating hydraulic fracturing jobs.
Superior hired Scott as an engineer, even though he had no formal engineering training. Superior was working on shallow wells, not the blockbuster shale wells common today. The money wasn’t nearly as good as it is now. The hours were tough. There was a lot of cursing and crude talk. It was the old-school oilfield, and Scott liked it just fine.
In 2009, months after the Great Recession had begun, he got his first taste of the downturn. He was laid off.
That downturn wasn’t a major blow. The industry contraction was shorter and less severe than in prior cycles, especially in Pennsylvania, where the Marcellus Shale had been discovered and companies rushed to mark their territory in the promising new shale play.
As Scott prepared to go back to school to get his teaching certificate, he heard from a recruiter and eventually accepted a job as a project manager for Pinnacle, a Halliburton company.
“I was pretty much working 340 days out of the year, at least 16 hours a day,” he said. “That’s just field work. Not counting phone calls.”
He started working the night shift and making sales calls during the day, with the eventual goal of becoming a district manager and settling down. At one point, his boss said he wanted to know about his home life.
“I said, ‘Boss, I’m never home.’”
“What are you saying?” his boss said.
“Well, I don’t have a life,” Scott said.
He sought a managerial position but didn’t get it and left the company in 2013.
Next was a sales job with a wireline company, which lasted two years. Then another wireline firm, which lasted a month.
This layoff came just before Super Bowl weekend in 2016. Scott’s father — who at that point had bounced around to other well service firms — was let go the same week.
Another month passed and Scott was offered a job with Weatherford, a large oilfield services company. The most recent downturn was underway, and drilling companies were pulling back on their capital budgets.
Scott had his guard up. He told his would-be boss, “If you can make me feel confident about coming over there, then I’m your man. But I don’t want to be left out in the cold.”
“He said, ‘Zach, Weatherford truly believes that the industry is coming back and they’re ready for this return.’”
The reassuring voice was laid off two months later, and Scott outlasted him by only a few weeks.
Over the years, Scott has considered going back to his original career choice. But now he is “hip deep in this stuff.”
“I’ve got a lot of contacts,” he said. “At what point do you just walk away?”