Saying building and maintaining more U.S. oil and natural gas refineries would cut dependence on foreign energy while producing high-paying jobs, the nation’s building trades unions are joining the oil industry to lobby for energy legislative goals they say would create those construction and refinery jobs.
The Oil And Natural Gas Labor-Management Committee, unveiled June 17 by American Petroleum Institute CEO Jack Gerard, AFL-CIO Building Trades Department President Mark Ayers and Carpenters President Doug McCarron, will concentrate on legislation now moving through Congress, including the climate cap-and-trade bill.
It’ll do so, they said in a telephone conference call, by mobilizing both company officials and construction union members to “send a coherent message,” as Gerard put it, to encourage exploration and development of domestic oil and natural gas reserves.
“Our ultimate goal is to secure more and better-paying jobs in the oil and gas industry,” Gerard explained. He said refinery workers earn far more than other industrial workers. Federal data shows an average refinery worker earned $29.37 hourly in May. Factory workers earned $18.08 and construction workers got $22.60.
But before refinery workers can start, refineries must be built, and that’s where construction unions come in. Ayers and McCarron said they and the refiners -- via the committee -- will lobby for legislation and regulations to encourage refinery building.
The oil industry has approximately 6 million jobs, and Gerard estimated 250,000 are unionized. But this initiative isn’t about them, Ayers said. It’s about creating jobs in building and staffing new refineries. “That was driving point #1 for us,” McCarron said.
Ayers explained the joint committee will advocate measures to “not only create jobs for construction workers who are now out of work, but to create potential new jobs in the industry” since unions have the expertise in their apprenticeship programs to train new refinery construction workers. He said that “demand for (U.S.) petroleum refining capacity has increased by 17% since 1995, but supply” -- construction -- hasn’t kept up.
“We’ll have to remind lawmakers that our nation has vital interests in ensuring that competitively priced domestic energy sources are part of a comprehensive energy policy,” Ayers added. One way of doing so, both Ayers and Gerard pointed out, is to ensure that U.S. oil firms are not put at competitive disadvantages in legislation.
One big issue, they said, will be taxes -- a controversial topic where oil and gas companies are involved. “We’re on board with API on taxes. They might be overtaxed. We’re prepared to tell them (Iawmakers) that by overtaxing the industry, they might be costing hundreds of thousands of future jobs,” Ayers said.