Schlumberger slashes 21,000 jobs amid pandemic

Schlumberger is cutting more than 21,000 jobs as the global coronavirus pandemic quashes demand for energy and oil prices are routed. The company will pay more than $1 billion in severance benefits.

The job cuts announced on Friday, about a quarter of its entire workforce, puts the number of people employed by the world’s largest oilfield services company close to where it was at the start of the oil and gas fracking boom that upended global energy markets and put the US on top.

Chesapeake Energy, a pioneer in fracking, sought bankruptcy protection last month.

“This has probably been the most challenging quarter in past decades,” said CEO Olivier Le Peuch.

Crude prices have dropped 33% this year, and natural gas has fallen 17%, as much of the world took shelter from the coronavirus.

Almost all major users of energy have been crippled because of the lockdown.

On Thursday, American Airlines posted a loss of more than $2 billion, and Southwest Airlines said it lost $915 million. That pushed the combined second-quarter loss of the nation’s four biggest airlines to more than $10 billion.

The number of people being screened at US airports is still down more than 70% compared with last year, according to the Transportation Security Administration.

Millions of people are working from home, rather than commuting to work daily. The cruise industry is shut down and factories, big consumers of energy, have been hammered.

But slowing global economic growth had already begun to weigh on the energy sector, and companies carrying a lot of debt had begun to fail.

More than 200 oil producers have filed for bankruptcy protection in the past five years. The global pandemic has intensified the shakeout. Last month, British oil giant BP said it would reduce it’s global workforce by 10,000.

On Friday, Schlumberger said that second quarter revenue plunged 35% and the company lost $3.43 billion. It expects the vast majority of the severance hit for departing employees will take place during the second half of the year.The company operates out of Houston and has major offices in London, Paris and The Hague.

Chevron Corp: Oil major Chevron Corp expects to reduce the dominance of white males in company management during cost-cutting this year, upping the share of senior level jobs held by women and ethnic minorities to 44% from 38% last year, the company said in a statement.

Like most of its peers in an industry struggling with the collapse of oil prices this year, Chevron is cutting spending, consolidating business units, and has asked some managers to reapply for their jobs.

Figures from the end of last year show that less than a quarter of Chevron’s US executives and senior managers were female, and only 22% were from ethnic minorities.

In an email sent to employees this week and seen by Reuters, Chief Human Resources Officer Rhonda Morris said the company selected 26% women for global roles in a second round of appointments and, in the United States, 29% of candidates selected were from ethnically diverse candidates.

A spokeswoman for the company confirmed the details and said those selections were permanent and that the diversity ratio was expected to remain at around 44% at the end of all appointment rounds.

Long owned and run predominantly by white males, the oil industry has drawn criticism along with other parts of corporate America for failing to do enough to promote diversity.

Women and people from non-white ethnic backgrounds represented 46% of the oil industry’s workforce in 2019 and are expected to fill 54% of total job opportunities through 2040, an IHS Markit analysis for the American Petroleum Institute shows.

However, they remain a minority in senior management.

Chevron executives were among those at big corporations to speak in support of the “black lives matter” campaign, which has become a global movement against racial injustice following the killing of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis.

Separately, oil prices edged lower on Friday, pressured by tensions between the United States and China, but some supportive economic data in Europe tempered losses.

Brent crude futures fell 13 cents to $43.18 a barrel by 11:19am. US West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures fell 5 cents to $41.02 a barrel.

Agencies