OT: <About 71 percent of the workforce is 50 or older.... The gap in generations resulted from the period of low oil prices starting in the 1980s through the mid-2000s, when shale drilling took off. “What you had was an industry that went up, went down, there were constantly people getting laid off, and people got to the point where they just didn’t want to be in the oil industry,”>
Sounds like a summation of my life in the oilpatch dating back to the mid-1980s... but the mid-to-late '80s were the most brutal, esp. '86's bust -- I remember Varco went from several thousand employees to just 200-300 (I was very lucky having been one of the last hired prior to the mass layoffs and somehow I escaped until I just left after 2003 when National Oilwell bought Varco out and began moving everything/everyone (except for the factory) to Houston).
Seemed like Varco was constantly either hiring like crazy during my years there or laying hundreds off. Three times my dept. was cut from 12-16 people down to just me -- I got really tired of replacing people I'd lost -- I'd say only about 1 in 6 of my people that were laid off one or more times returned when I offered them their old jobs back -- they just didn't want to take the chance of being laid off again in 2-3 years -- though when I did bring someone back (and I brought one guy back 3 times!), HR reinstated them at their former seniority and service time, which was sort of an incentive.
I learned a lot working at Varco, obviously, but much prefer working with my subsequent employer (and current consulting client) in oilpatch (a private, employee owned outfit with corporate headquarters in England, but with offices in almost every time zone in the world -- though the division I work with is headquartered in Houston, the actual primary location with the most people, engineers and largest manufacturing capabilities is here in SoCal. |
