Don’t have a college education and want to make bank and take half the year off? Oil rig work is the hot job for many Americans
Sunny Nagpaul
Sat, January 27, 2024
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Not many on-the-ground jobs that offer a salary over $55,000 USD for just half a year’s work. But that’s the money for those who opt for the rigor of an oil rig, a hot topic on people’s tongues this week.
According to Google, interest in oil rig jobs is having a moment. Searches for oil rig work reached a five-year high, surging particularly especially in the southern states of Mississippi, Alabama, Texas and Arkansas, which abut the Gulf of Mexico and its 6,000-plus oil and gas structures, or rigs. A few reasons help explain why more people want in on the job despite deadly on-the-clock risks and increased environmental pollution.
Good money; no college required
According to research on the impact of oil and gas job opportunities, most jobs in the industry pay well, especially for those who don’t have college degrees. Entry-level oil work only requires a high school diploma or equivalent, which could be tempting for more than half of all Americans over age 25 who don’t have a college degree. Starting salaries average $55,000 per year, according to ZipRecruiter, while those in management positions could pocket well over $100,000 per year, according to oil industry law firm Arnold & Itkin.
According to Amanda Chuan, a professor in labor relations at Michigan State University, the attractive starting pay especially entices college-aged young men, who account for about 20% of the workforce, and are increasingly facing decisions between enrolling in school and risking years of debt and taking a high starting salary that they could pocket much sooner.
“These are jobs that don’t require a lot of cognizant skill, but you’re paid a lot for the long shifts, living in a camp, being away from home, chemical exposure and high risk of injury,” she said. “It’s extremely exhausting, mentally draining and a lot of people are not willing to do it—so if you are, you’ll make a lot.” It’s a concept called compensating wage differentials, Chuan explained—essentially, paying more for less-desirable work.
Oil rig workers also face pollution hazards, according to the U.S Department of Labor, due to spending a lot of time in confined spaces. Petroleum storage tanks, mud pits, reserve pits and other spaces around an oil wellhead can all come with more exposure to chemicals, flammable vapors or gasses that could cause workers to suffocate.
The cost-of-living crisis, though, is making more people willing to take on the back-breaking work (and fatal risks) of rigs.
According to a report by the nonprofit National Low Income Housing Coalition, renters nationwide are struggling to afford housing, with the lowest-income residents in states like Arizona, Texas and Florida most worried about affording housing.
Boom-bust nature of the industry
Another reason for more labor interest in rigs is just the “boom-bust” nature of the oil industry. During booms, periods of high demand for oil, investors pour in and trigger overproduction, according to the Colorado School of Mines. Busts follow the overproduction, which see lower prices for oil and under-investment by the industry. The bust period of lower prices then triggers more demand for cheap oil, which shifts the price higher again and the cycle continues.
The current boom that finds oil rig workers in hot demand right now is in part due to global wars, like the invasion of Ukraine and the siege on Gaza, which means the country can’t rely on as much oil coming in. “Because our usual supplies for energy are being cut short right now,” Chuan said, “the country is turning more to domestic production of oil.”
The boom-bust nature of the industry also affects changes in labor demand, she said, as “during booms, newspapers report thousands of new high-paying jobs,” but “during busts, many jobs vanish, potentially leaving thousands unemployed.” Several such layoffs have occurred as the industry cycles through its high and lower value periods, with 2014 and 2020 as some of the biggest years for bust-fueled layoffs.
Chuan explained that the high starting pays and long vacations are meant to compensate for the risks people assume on the job. For younger workers, the particular risk is that “it leads you away from investing in your human capital, or education and transferable skills, that could help you find future employment that does not depend on the boom-bust cycle.”
Half a year of PTO—but 12-hour days
According to Arnold & Itkin’s blog post, many workers face shifts of 14 days on the clock, 21 days off. That means they work for full-day shifts, which can be up to 12 hours long and include night shifts, for two straight weeks. Then they are rewarded with three weeks off. For those who work on offshore rig sites, “two straight weeks at sea can be a harrowing experience for many, although some rigs are equipped with impressive living quarters for the crew.”
Living quarters can include “an onsite gym, theater, indoor sports facilities, computers, and more to occupy the time,” the blog says. That can be essential, as many people are not able to return home on their off time due to travel expenses and logistics and end up staying “on the rig the entire time.”
What would you do on the oil rigs, and what do you risk?
According to Indeed, an oil rig worker’s main responsibility is to extract, store and process oil—relying on lots of equipment. They find themselves at the helms of drills, cranes, forklifts and more to guide pipes into drilling wells. They gain an understanding of chemical levels to prevent the pipes from corroding and track environmental changes that could affect drilling productivity.
On risks, Arnold & Itkin states that oil rig crews experience some of the highest rates of injuries and fatalities in the country. 2008 was a particularly deadly year, with 120 oil and gas workers killed on the job. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 470 oil workers died between 2014 and 2019, over 400 of them on the job and 69 of them from cardiac complications. The death rate has also been increasing: In 2019, the rate of oil worker fatalities was about 12%, compared to about 6% in 2017.
The most common causes of injuries include fires, falls, fatigue, machinery malfunctions, and lack of safety culture on rigs, according to Arnold & Itkin. In one Reddit thread, nearly 100 users shared their most terrifying experiences on oil rigs—describing brutal burns, equipment that maimed people, and witnessing entire coastlines degrade quickly.
According to several studies, marine ecosystems and communities who live near waters with rigs face threats from water contamination and dying sea animals. Especially dangerous are seismic airguns, which are towed behind ships and used to shoot blasts of compressed air which are 100,000 times more intense than jet engines, to find oil trapped deep underneath the ocean floor. According to Oceana, an international organization that researches oceans, these blasts are repeated about 6 times a minute almost all day at oil rigs for weeks at a time, and can kill marine animals like sea turtles and fish.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
No diploma? No problem! US Navy again lowers requirements as it struggles to meet recruitment goals
LOLITA C. BALDOR
Fri, January 26, 2024
FILE - The USS Paul Hamilton is seen after passing through the Strait of Hormuz, May 19, 2023. The U.S. Navy is starting to enlist individuals who didn’t graduate from high school or get a GED, marking the second time in about a year that the service has opened the door to lower-performing recruits as it struggles to meet enlistment goals.. (AP Photo/Jon Gambrell)
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Navy is starting to enlist individuals who didn't graduate from high school or get a GED, marking the second time in about a year that the service has opened the door to lower-performing recruits as it struggles to meet enlistment goals.
The decision follows a move in December 2022 to bring in a larger number of recruits who score very low on the Armed Services Qualification Test. Both are fairly rare steps that the other military services largely avoid or limit, even though they are all finding it increasingly difficult to attract the dwindling number of young people who can meet the military’s physical, mental and moral standards.
Under the new plan, Navy recruits without an education credential will be able to join as long as they score 50 or above on the qualification test, which is out of 99. The last time the service took individuals without education credentials was in 2000.
“We get thousands of people into our recruiting stations every year that want to join the Navy but do not have an education credential. And we just turn them away,” said Vice Adm. Rick Cheeseman, the Navy's chief of personnel, in an interview Friday with The Associated Press.
He said that of the more than 2,400 who were turned away last year, as many as 500 of them could score high enough to get in. He said he has already sent an order to his recruiters to start the new expanded effort, adding, “I’m hoping all my recruiters have called all 2,442 of them in the last 72 hours, and we’ll see how it goes ... We'll try to get some test takers this weekend.”
In the wake of the pandemic, the services have faced significant enlistment challenges. COVID-19 forced the military to shut down recruiting stations and they were closed out of high schools and many public fairs of events where they historically found success reaching prospective candidates.
But even as things opened up, the military struggled to compete with higher-paying businesses in the tight job market, particularly as companies began to offer the types of benefits — such as college funding — that had often made the military a popular choice. Those economic problems were only exacerbated by the sharp political divide in the country and young people's fears of being killed or injured going to war.
Last fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, the Navy, Army and Air Force all failed to meet their recruitment goals, while the Marine Corps and the tiny Space Force met their targets. The previous fiscal year, the Army fell 15,000 short of its enlistment goal of 60,000, and the other services had to dig into the pools of delayed entry candidates in order to meet their recruiting numbers.
Last year, the Navy's enlistment goal was 37,700, but the service brought in just 31,834. This year, Cheeseman said, he set the goal higher — at 40,600. The total size of the Navy for 2024 is set at 337,800.
“I need these sailors. So it’s a stretch goal. We’re telling our recruiters to go get 40,600 people to join the Navy,” he said. “We don’t fully expect to get that many. But we’re going for it.”
The other services have largely balked at such changes.
The Navy is the only service that enlists anyone considered a “category four” recruit, meaning they scored 30 or less on the qualification test. The service expanded the number of those category four recruits arguing that a number of jobs — such as cook or boatswain mate — don't require an overall high test score, as long as they meet the job standards.
The Army will only take those lowest scoring candidates into their so-called Future Soldier Prep Course, which gives them weeks of instruction and the opportunity to increase their score in order to make the grade and enlist. The Navy allows low-scoring recruits to go through its Future Sailor Prep Course but doesn't require an increased score to enlist.
In addition, the Army and Marine Corps require a high school diploma or GED equivalent, and the Air Force said it will only take recruits without a diploma if they score a 65 or higher on the qualification test. Those numbers are very small — just 110 of the nearly 26,900 Air Force recruits brought in last year, either had a GED or no education credential at all.
Other services cite concerns that lower-performing recruits may be more likely to wash out of boot camp or could present more disciplinary problems over time.
Cheeseman said he believes the biggest risk is that they do fail boot camp at higher rates, but he said the difference hasn't been significant so far for the low-scoring recruits brought in last year. Overall, 11.4% of those recruits didn't finish boot camp, compared to less than 6.5% of the high-scoring sailors.
He said Navy leaders had been talking about opening up enlistment to those without high school credentials for a while in an effort to expand the pool of potential sailors.
“We just finally decided, okay, let’s go,” he said, adding that the service was looking for other ways to reach untapped talent. “My, argument for accepting that risk is that we have capacity of boot camp. We’re not filling the seats. So I’m willing to take a risk.”
