I worked for Laborde Marine in Bayou Vista, la for seven years. I remember when Obama got elected. There were crew boats stacked every where. Laborde never laid any one off. We were given the chioce to go home early if we wanted. Of course they cut certain things. 401k match, day rates by 10 to 15 percent, but we all still had a job and were grateful for it. Health insurance rates went up, but that seems the norm ever year for any job nationally. Then we had the BP oil spill. That hurt everyone. Laborde still never laid any one off. They used most personal from our 1600 ton supply vessels on are crew boats. Also remember Laborde is not a giant company in comparison to giants like Chouest, HOS, or Harvey. If one of their 5 supply vessels dont have a job it hurts everyone in the company. At the same time, in the seven years I worked for laborde I never remember any lay offs. My only regret was leaving the company back in September to take a break from the Gulf and address some other issues in my life. I started looking for work in December with an umlimited ab, thinking it would be no problem to find a job. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Now I am living with my parents, sleeping on there couch, and looking for a job in the South Suburbs in Chicago for about half of what I was making. Now I am waiting for the oil field to pick back up, and thinking about where I went wrong. Haha. Live and learn I guess The moral of this story is never quit your job until you have another one. Best luck to everyone working In the gulf or looking for work.
[QUOTE=SeaMonkey6969;151476]I worked for Laborde Marine in Bayou Vista, la for seven years. I remember when Obama got elected. There were crew boats stacked every where. Laborde never laid any one off. We were given the chioce to go home early if we wanted. Of course they cut certain things. 401k match, day rates by 10 to 15 percent, but we all still had a job and were grateful for it. Health insurance rates went up, but that seems the norm ever year for any job nationally. Then we had the BP oil spill. That hurt everyone. Laborde still never laid any one off. They used most personal from our 1600 ton supply vessels on are crew boats. Also remember Laborde is not a giant company in comparison to giants like Chouest, HOS, or Harvey. If one of their 5 supply vessels dont have a job it hurts everyone in the company. At the same time, in the seven years I worked for laborde I never remember any lay offs. My only regret was leaving the company back in September to take a break from the Gulf and address some other issues in my life. I started looking for work in December with an umlimited ab, thinking it would be no problem to find a job. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Now I am living with my parents, sleeping on there couch, and looking for a job in the South Suburbs in Chicago for about half of what I was making. Now I am waiting for the oil field to pick back up, and thinking about where I went wrong. Haha. Live and learn I guess The moral of this story is never quit your job until you have another one. Best luck to everyone working In the gulf or looking for work.[/QUOTE]
Heard from a fellow co-worker that Gulf Resource Management has laid off several folks, cut pay 12% and has stacked half of the fleet.
You should try the different Great Lakes companies in the spring if you haven’t landed anything by then.
Good luck.
Don’t worry about the oil industry as “Oil always floats to the top”. This is a down-tick and the price will recover from this and the GOM will come back. Try Grand ( Theft Navigation, as a buddy of mine who works there calls it) River Navigation for work. He works a month on, month off as first engineer. He doesn’t make a ton of dough but he can work four months a year and surf 8 by living in the canary islands.
I heard from a friend that Harvey will be cutting $50.00 every quarter, it will be a $200.00 per day cut at the end of the year.
[QUOTE=cml;151642]I heard from a friend that Harvey will be cutting $50.00 every quarter, it will be a $200.00 per day cut at the end of the year.[/QUOTE]
The union will never allow that!
Well the tug boaters that ran south who have NE recency will come back to well paying jobs & oil is still be moved.
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See y’all next time.
Article from NYT today. I think someone touched on this idea in the Forum last week, and I had similar conversation out of the Arabian Gulf on Monday.
[B]As Oil Prices Fall, Banks Serving the Energy Industry Brace for a Jolt[/B]
By MICHAEL CORKERY and PETER EAVIS JANUARY 11, 2015 8:46 PM January 11, 2015 8:46 pm 38 Comments
Tumbling oil prices are dimming one of the few big bright spots that banks have enjoyed since the financial crisis.
Banks have been lending hand over fist to companies in the nation’s energy industry, underwriting bonds, advising on mergers, even financing the building of homes for oil workers. All of this has provided a boon to banks that have been struggling to find more companies and consumers wanting to borrow.
Yet with the price of crude oil falling below levels sufficient for some energy companies to service their huge debts, strains are being felt and defaults are likely. While it may take some time for the crunch in the oil industry to translate into losses, one thing already seems clear: The energy banking boom is over.
“At the least, you are talking about a slowdown in loan growth for the banks in the energy-producing states,” said Charles Peabody, a banking specialist at Portales Partners. “That, we feel pretty strongly about.”
Mr. Peabody covered Texas banks in the 1980s, when a slump in the energy business helped cause large losses at the lenders, and banks to collapse or be rescued. He says he expects the current problems for energy companies to lead to losses, too.
“We do believe that you will start to see some defaults,” he said.
This week, as many of the largest banks report their earnings for the final three months of 2014, investors will press the banks for answers on how a sudden slump in the once-roaring oil and gas industry may hurt their bottom lines.
The expected slowdown comes as banks, both big and small, have finally dug out from the wreckage of the financial crisis and have been looking for new ways to bolster their revenues.
When times are good, the capital-intensive oil business is a banker’s dream. From new wells dug in North Dakota and Texas to the oil patch of Alberta, oil producers have turned to Wall Street and local banks to help them sell billions of dollars in bonds, raise equity and arrange lines of credit.
“It’s been a hot industry, probably a little too hot,” said Dick Evans, chief executive of Cullen/Frost Bankers of Texas, which has a relatively sizable energy practice. “But it is not time to panic. We have been in the game a long time. I am comfortable with what we have been doing.”
There is a flip side to lower oil prices that helps the banks, or at least those with large consumer businesses. The less cash consumers have to spend filling up their gas tanks or heating their homes, the more emboldened they may feel to sign up for a credit card or take out a mortgage.
“As consumers have more money in their pocket, surely that helps Wells Fargo,” the chief executive of that bank, John G. Stumpf, said at a financial services conference last month. “I would say net-net this is a good thing for the country.”
Still, if oil prices remain near $50 a barrel for long, economists and industry analysts expect a sharp deceleration in production this year, idling energy bankers and cutting into their lucrative fees.
A Boon for Banks
Lending, underwriting and advising on behalf of energy companies has been a strong business for North American banks. An expected slowdown as a result of falling oil prices may hurt banks’ revenue.
Two of the banks that may be the hardest hit by lower investment-banking fees are among the biggest. Wells Fargo derived about 15 percent of its investment banking fee revenue last year from the oil and gas industry, while at Citigroup, the business accounted for roughly 12 percent, according to the data provider Dealogic.
At some of the larger banks in Canada, a slowdown in fees could be even more pronounced. At Scotiabank, about 35 percent of its investment banking revenue came from oil and gas companies last year.
And Wall Street firms that financed energy deals may now have trouble offloading some of the debt, as they had originally planned.
Morgan Stanley, for instance, led a group of banks that made $850 million of loans to Vine Oil and Gas, an affiliate of Blackstone, a private equity firm. Morgan Stanley is still trying to sell the debt, according to a person briefed on the transaction. Similarly, Goldman Sachs and UBS led a $220 million loan last year to the private equity firm Apollo Global Management to buy Express Energy Services. Not all the debt has been sold to other investors, according to people briefed on the transaction.
A precipitous drop in oil prices can quickly turn loans that once seemed safe and conservatively underwritten into risky assets.
The collateral underpinning many energy loans, for example, is oil that was valued at $80 a barrel at the time the loans were made. As oil has dropped well below that price in recent months, the value of the banks’ collateral has sunk.
Many oil companies have bought hedges on oil prices, which are providing lenders with additional cushion. But when those hedges expire, and if oil prices remain low, the banks may need to reserve money against the loans.
“At $50 a barrel, things can get a bit testy,” said Christopher Mutascio, a banking analyst with Keefe, Bruyette & Woods.
Some of the greater risks may be the loans the banks have extended to the many kinds of services companies that work in and around the oil industry. Some of these services companies, lured by the boom, may have short track records, analysts say.
Low oil prices can have ripple effects that many banks may not anticipate, particularly in states such as North Dakota and Oklahoma where energy is a large driver of the economy.
When oil prices crashed in the 1980s, many Texas banks failed not because of loans to oil producers, but because of loans to local real estate developers who had been caught in the energy bust.
Just over 20 percent of the loans at [B]MidSouth Bank, based in Lafayette, La.,[/B] are to oil and gas companies, a high proportion relative to its peers. But Rusty Cloutier, MidSouth’s chief executive, said the bank had focused its lending on services companies with seasoned management that were most likely prepared for a dip in activity.
“Our companies understand that they ride the crest, the up and the down,” Mr. Cloutier said. “We are not panicking.”
Mr. Stumpf of Wells Fargo also expressed confidence in his bank’s ability to weather a downturn. Energy loans make up about 2 percent of the bank’s loans.
“Some marginal producers will get challenged in this, but this is not something new to them,” he said last month. “Cycles like this happen, so industry will be able to work through this.”
Investors in the junk bond market — of which energy companies account for an estimated 18 percent, according to JPMorgan Chase — are not so optimistic.
Junk bonds issued by energy companies are signaling a jarring jump in the number of defaults in the coming months. Martin S. Fridson, chief investment officer at Lehmann Livian Fridson Advisors, said the yields on energy junk bonds appeared to be predicting that 6 percent of the bonds would default this year, and even more in 2016.
“As far as the high-yield market is concerned, the energy sector is in a recession,” Mr. Fridson said.
Not going to reveal which company but a source is telling us that at least one of the big Gulf Coast OSV operators is cutting 10% from exec pay and 5% from other shoreside personnel this year, plus layoffs this quarter.
I’m sure glad I’m tugboat trash.
Research isn’t looking so bad now.
Would that source be the fellow that released the fleet wide video email? Just come out and say it.
Why not say which company?? A lot of people on here post confidential information for the assistance of fellow Mariners. Some even at great personal risk. No risk for you.
Sailors Union of the Pacific has plenty of work on it’s MSC contracted vessels. For more $ than you made with Laborde. Give them a call or pm me if you like.
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[QUOTE=Johnny Canal;151687]The union will never allow that![/QUOTE]
Ha ha, funny…
What union would that be? Harvey is not union.
It’s the United sarcasm workers local 123
[QUOTE=Capnklump;151825]What union would that be? Harvey is not union.[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Capnklump;151825]What union would that be? Harvey is not union.[/QUOTE]
Oh yeah I forgot about that one…