There is no right way to lay off employees. Both parties suffer in a layoff, even if - as often happens - each ultimately profits. But others suffer, too. Layoffs have social and economic consequences.
In the oil and gas industry, layoffs have become a continuous process. At any given time, it seems, some company somewhere is severing jobs. The economic pressures are relentless to "rationalize," to "downsize," to "reengineer." Those pressures are real. Company managers do not sack workers for the fun of it.
The pressures are pervasive as well as continuous. Companies once proud to offer jobs for life lately have had to recant the promise. Most large companies have cut or are cutting jobs and the workers who held them. Pain is inevitable. Company managers can only try to hold it to some ill-defined minimum. Threatened workers can only hope for the best possible treatment from corporate entities toward which they feel diminishing confidence and loyalty.
BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT
Companies in the throes of this difficult process deserve the benefit of the doubt. Criticism means little when applied to an activity for which there is no clearly right set of procedures. Inevitably, however, there will be steps in this continuous, pervasive, and painful process that would hurt the industry at large if they became trends. Such steps demand attention.
For its current round of worldwide exploration job cuts, Marathon Oil Co. has decided not to disclose numbers of positions in jeopardy. The company says it might report figures when it finishes the layoffs by the end of the year's third quarter. Whether or not it does so will not change the course of human events. But it will say something about the state of communications between oil companies and the publics they affect with their decisions and operations.
Layoffs disrupt not just severed employees and their managers but communities and the industry at large. Outsiders may not deserve the priority consideration rightly accorded employees destined for layoff. But they shouldn't be snubbed, either. For the communities and industry in which Marathon employees live and work, the company's layoff targets have commercial and professional significance, at the very least. By the fourth quarter this year, a certain number of certain types of Marathon employees in certain places will be looking for jobs, limiting their spending, maybe trying to sell their homes and cutting back on volunteer work, possibly seeking new careers. Those numbers matter to people outside the company, and those people should matter to the company and to the petroleum industry.
RELEVANT INFORMATION
Whatever the measure, Marathon's top managers know what their layoff targets are. They have chosen not to disclose them and may have excellent reason for keeping the targets secret. But what they told the public in an official statement is that an emphasis on numbers leads to misinterpretation that "is not in anyone's best interest, particularly our employees." That's not a reason; it's a judgment about the ability of communities that will be affected by Marathon's actions to deal with information of unquestionable relevance to them. In politics, they call that sort of thing spin control.
Marathon is no chronically insular company. It has a well-deserved reputation as a good corporate neighbor. But it works in an industry in which secrecy breeds public suspicion, which in turn becomes chronic political difficulty. The industry doesn't need more problems of that type. It must be careful not to let layoff secrecy become a standard practice.
Copyright 1994 Oil & Gas Journal. All Rights Reserved.
