HIRING SURGES AMID GULF COAST ENERGY BOOM

Expansion drives down unemployment

Bloomberg News

America’s lowest jobless rate in any metro area in February was measured at the Louisiana city of Thibodaux — 2.8 percent.

The Gulf Coast energy boom has driven down unemployment and lifted wages as a labor shortage threatens to slow the boom and push back the date when the country can meet its own energy needs.

“Where are the workers going to come from?” asked energy executive Peter Cella, who heads Chevron Phillips Chemical Co.’s $6 billion polyethylene plastics plant going up near Houston.

Over the next year, companies will spend $35 billion on expansion projects along the Houston Ship Channel, creating a total of 265,800 jobs, a Greater Houston Port Bureau sur- vey shows.

Louisiana, where $60 billion in building projects are planned through 2016, will need 86,300 workers over that time, estimates the state’s Workforce Commission.

“This is an exponentially larger investment period than Louisiana has ever seen,” said commission spokesman Tom Guarisco.

Trades facing the biggest shortages include welders, electricians, instrumentation technicians, fabricators and pipe fitters, said Roger Blackburn, executive account manager at Infinity Construction Services LP on the Gulf Coast.

When projects in engineering and permitting stages start construction late this year, wages will rise 15 to 20 percent “almost overnight,” said Peter Huntsman of Salt Lake City- based Huntsman Corp.

Pay started to rise late last year, said Mike Ber- gen, an executive vice president at Industrial Info Resources Inc. in Sugar Land, Texas. The most skilled combo-pipe welders on the Gulf Coast now earn $34.75 an hour, 2 percent more than in the previous quarter.

Companies have begun to recruit workers from Canada and other countries, and are sweetening benefit packages to attract and retain them.

Other companies are tempting workers with gourmet dining, retention bonuses and smoking ar- eas, which are usually not allowed at chemical facilities, said Russell Heinen, a senior director at IHS Inc. of Englewood, Colo.

Bechtel Corp., the biggest U.S. construction contractor, offers the amenity of running-water toilets, said Jim Ivany, an executive vice president at the San Francisco company.

“If somebody came to me on the Gulf Coast, some high-school kid,” Ivany said, “and said, ‘I don’t know what to do with my life,’ I’d tell him, ‘Learn to weld.’ ”