Today, I felt like I sailed down the crest of a huge wave, remaining untouched. For the mariner working in the offshore oil industry, the holiday season and its aftermath can be a tough time. It always means the following:
- Being away from family and friends
- Dealing with horrendous wintertime weather at sea
- The possibility of salary cuts and layoffs
A Jan. 12, 2015 article from Reuters titled “Oil dives anew, falling 5 percent on Goldman downgrade, outages” by Samantha Sunne describes the plummeting state of oil prices. Currently, the price of one crude oil barrel the U.S. has dropped to $46.07 with little sign of recovering soon. The profitable mark that oil companies aim for is around $100.00 per barrel. With this economic climate, most mariners in the energy industry know that dropping oil prices traditionally lead to salary cuts and layoffs.
Mariners working in the Santa Barbara channel typically have more stable positions since active oil exploration is prohibited in local waters. Existing California operations are continuously staffed through the year to meet demand. Those of us who have full time seafaring jobs still aren’t impervious to layoffs, and the current state of the oil industry worried the mariners at my company. At our first meeting of the new year, on Jan. 12, it was announced that all mariners at our company would have jobs in 2015 and that no salaries would be cut. It was the best possible news for me.
Seafarers in the North Sea oil industry in Scotland and Norway haven’t been so lucky. Shippingwatch news article by Katrine Gronvald Raun, “The First 10,000 Oil Jobs Will Disappear Here”, relates how North Sea companies collectively plan to lay off 9,551 employees at the beginning of this year, devastating the local economies.
Scottish Labour party leader Jim Murphy decries the layoffs and is currently trying to convince the Scottish government to set up a “resilience” fund to help compensate North Sea workers who have been displaced due to the low ebb of oil production.
“You cannot, in one country, prevent the entire collapse of the oil price, but what you can do is offset the human consequence and the industry consequence,” Murphy said in a Daily Record and Sunday Mail article written by David Clegg. So far, the Scottish government has yet to agree that any fund is necessary, while the layoffs are still imminent.
Across the sea, mariners are suffering the ill consequences of falling oil prices but for now, those of us working in a small sector of the Santa Barbara channel offshore oil industry are still thankfully employed.
Modern Seafarers on the Central Coast 