| Sue Gross: Promise of drilling jobs is an empty one |
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Sue Gross • My View • March 5, 2010 "While offshore-drilling enthusiasts tour the state promising thousands of new jobs for Florida (20,000 rig jobs and 231,000 jobs overall), we are being bombarded by TV and print ads from "The people of America's Oil and Natural Gas Industry," which sounds so much friendlier than the American Petroleum Institute — which it actually is — made up of 400 "corporate members" of the oil industry. In a double-page spread in Newsweek, featuring an offshore rig glowing in a sunset beside beaming shirt-sleeved workers, the copy reads "…natural gas jobs alone have shot up 20 percent since 2006." With unemployment soaring in the Sunshine State, sunny promises are highly seductive — and utterly preposterous. Oil and gas extraction is a volatile industry that recently plunged into its third major downturn since the late 1990s. As a result, nearly one in every six Texans employed by the oil and gas industry, or 37,500 workers, lost their jobs. Texas communities that had based their economies on the boom and bust oil and gas markets were hurting. A sobering prediction for Florida to consider: The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that employment in the oil and gas extraction industry will decline in less than a decade. And its statistics contradict the oil lobby's job creation estimates for Florida. In 2008, the total number of "extraction workers," the people directly employed on rigs, was only 20,900. Oil proponents would have us believe that drilling off our coast will magically double the total number of rig jobs in the entire United States? Besides, those plum rig jobs might not even go to Americans. U.S. maritime law requires that all seagoing vessels, including oil rigs, operating on the outer continental shelf employ only U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents. But a foreign-flagged vessel is exempt if it is more than 50-percent foreign-owned, and fewer than half the rigs actively drilling in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico last November were flying American flags." More>>>>
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