In the comments on my previous posting, someone mentioned deep sea oil rigs. Now, there’s a captive work-force. So, I was curious.
Sure enough, it’s a captive work-force. You are not allowed to bring alcohol or other drugs, naturally, onto the platform. I was surprised by the shift structure: on some rigs they run 12-hr shifts but then rotate the teams in and out of a rig 2 weeks on/3 weeks off. According to: [experience]
Typically salaries for roustabouts and roughnecks (drill deck workers) are approximately US $300 per day. Annual salaries work out to be approximately US $47,000.
welcome to the world of “nope”
I guess with the long shifts that comes out to $25, for some hard dangerous work 120 miles from anything. There are plenty of advantages, though: you get good time off and some workers take grueling schedules in the winter months then spend the summer at a beach. It’s rough, tough, gig work. As always, being on good terms with the people who make up the schedules is important, so you can get the good rotations instead of winding up in the North Atlantic in the winter. I was surprised to see that many sites describe living on an oil rig as enjoying “4 or 5 star accomodations.” Whoever said that is probably not speaking from having experienced the executive lifestyle.
A lady I used to sometimes hang out with, who was (at the time) a journalist covering information security, used to work as a mud calculator on a rig down near New Orleans. She said it was pretty cool, really, except for the one time a guy got wrapped around the drill and went through the collar and they had to fish all the big chunks out and bag them up. But that, honestly, doesn’t sound as dangerous or stressful as working as an Uber driver in Los Angeles for $8-11/hr depending on how hard you work, without benefits.
It oughtn’t surprise you to discover that offshore oil rig workers are unionized. It might surprise you to know that the Obama administration put in place more stringent requirements for safety inspections on rigs, which the Trump administration rolled back, because they love the working man so much. [concerned scientists] It makes me wonder, if the coal jobs were brought back, wouldn’t Trump and his cronies try to make sure the coal companies were able to set up mining towns with company stores and Baldwin-Felts’ guards? It actually might be necessary, in order to make coal economically viable again.
Here’s an interesting correlation: [bureau of labor statistics]
In private industry, unionized service workers earned an average of $16.17 per hour, compared with $10.16 per hour for nonunionized service workers. In state and local government, unionized service workers averaged $22.84 per hour while service workers who were not unionized earned $14.23 per hour.
So, capitalism can be 38% more efficient if it gets rid of unions and pockets the difference? <snark> I wonder if that has been driving any employment trends we’re seeing? </snark>
Hasn’t the whole way coal is mined significantly changed so as to reduce the amount of labor? Isn’t that the whole point of “mountaintop removal” – they use a bunch of explosives to rubble-fy a big chunk or rock containing a coal seam, use some heavy equipment to pick it up and cart it off to some place where they have some machinery sort out the the coal from everything else.
And hasn’t something similar happen with logging? Instead of sending out multiple small teams to climb up trees, lop off branches, fell the tree, etc, using chainsaws and such, now they have a single person who sits in something like an excavator with a special attachment. The equipment operator attaches this thing to the base of a trunk, which then cuts the tree down, and strips it of limbs, in a couple of minutes. I have no idea how many acres a traditional logger could clear in a day, but I’m fairly certain a moderately trained equipment operator could clear an acre in less than an hour, and that’s just a single person.
I almost failed highschool because I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to type without looking at the keys. The teacher liked to remind us how important this skill was, and how if we were merely proficient, it could save us vast sums of money vs. hiring typists, and if we were actually good, we could make great money in college and what not typing papers for those who couldn’t. Then, I went to college, started using computers, and none of that was relevant anymore. And, thanks to the internet, I spontaneously learned touch typing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Thank you for looking into this.
Also: efficiency. Oh, my. What an inverted pyramid of bullshit rests on that concept: PPP, PFI, privatization. Because the private sector is oh so more efficient. My conversations on this usually go:
Otherwise nice Tory-voting person: “But the private sector is more efficient”
Me: “At what?”
ONTVP: “Lowering cost/reducing overcapacity/eliminating wastefulness/generally being good at business”
Me: “Uh-huh”
ONTVP: “You must agree that’s a good thing!”
Me: “For whom?”
ONTVP: [hopefully beginning to realize the conflict of interest, as I further point out that, even if reduced cost education or health care or bridge building or SARS-CoV-2 testing was as good as the full-price alternative, which it isn’t; — even if reducing overcapacity of some things was a good thing, which it isn’t, because you sometimes suddenly over-need capacity; — even if those things were true, being good at business means making as little of the public money go to the costs of building and maintaining those things and paying the people who run them, and as much of it as possible go to your shareholders, to your stock options, to your buddies the subcontractors, and to the better, much more expensive lawyers than the other party to the public-private partnership contract.]
cvoinescu@#2:
“Lowering cost/reducing overcapacity/eliminating wastefulness/generally being good at business”
When they say that, I usually like to ask how having 5 shitty cell phone companies competing for customers, and fixing the same prices, eliminates overcapacity, waste, and makes the market more efficient for the customer. In the US, anyone who has experience with Verizon or AT&T cannot say with a straight face that deregulating phone/internet has helped anyone except the vendors. It hasn’t even helped them, they’re so busy bullshitting up their customers that they don’t have time to offer, you know, phone service. That’s why the US is so butthurt over 5G: they have no actual 5G but you can pay for it and have it show up as 5G on your bill. Seriously: the FCC has decided (thanks, Ajit Pai!) that it’s OK for AT&T and Verizon to claim they have 5G when they don’t, because they have promised that they will have 5G eventually. So, something.
lochaber@#1:
Hasn’t the whole way coal is mined significantly changed so as to reduce the amount of labor?
Yes, now a strip mine is run by a handful of people and some heavy equipment.
And hasn’t something similar happen with logging?
Yup. And that’s where those shitty jobs went. The companies couldn’t make the money they wanted to with the margins they had, so they shut down and went off to frack, or whatever. It’s not that these things can’t be done profitably, it’s that they can’t be done obscenely profitably.
This is clearly an improvement from the vendor’s point of view: they still get to charge, but they don’t have to bother with the pesky details of actually delivering a service, freeing them up to concentrate entirely on marketing and billing. The ultimate end goal of modern capitalism!
Bwahahahaha. Two words for those Tories: “Southern Rail.”