Oil job losses mount around world
Still nursing deep financial wounds from the oil market collapse, the petroleum industry has shed roughly 25,000 jobs around the world in the last two months, cutting upstream workers that analysts say may be difficult to replace when the downturn ends.
Job losses in recent weeks have increased the industry tally to more than 233,000 since the slump in crude prices took hold late last year, according to energy recruiter Swift Worldwide Resources. Given the speed at which companies are cutting payrolls — a rate that hasn’t slowed yet — Swift expects layoffs to grow to more than 250,000 this year and to increase again next year if oil prices languish at current levels.
Swift CEO Tobias Read said there’s no sign of an immediate turnaround in the oil and gas job market, and the situation “is likely to get worse.”
Crude prices started crumbling a year ago after the Organization of
the Petroleum Exporting Countries signaled that its member countries — which collectively produce about a third of the world’s oil — wouldn’t slow production to balance the oil market and bring up prices that had plummeted as international markets filled up with an oversupply of crude.
Prices rose somewhat in the spring, but the market tumbled again in July and August. Analysts had said the recent decline would trigger another wave of job cuts, after significant cutbacks earlier this year.
U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate crude fell $1.07 to $40.67 in trading Tuesday on the New York Mercantile Exchange. International benchmark Brent crude lost 99 cents to $43.57 in European trading.
In the last two months, U.S. oil producers Devon Energy and Marathon Oil Corp. announced a combined 400 job cuts, while U.S. oil services supplier Superior Energy Services said it would shed 4,760 jobs. Canadian oil producer and refiner Husky Energy said it cut 1,400 jobs, and Maersk Oil, the oil and gas production arm of Danish shipping conglomerate AP Moller-Maersk Group, is cutting 12 percent of its global head count, or around 1,250 jobs.
Read said the jobs will be hard to fill once the market recovers. He says his company’s estimate uses conservative assumptions in tallying job losses, using both publicly available data and keeping an “ear to the ground” in cases where losses are hard to track.