Recent news reports say that more than 40,000 people could lose their jobs at Chevron gas stores. About 40,000 Chevron employees watched a movie last week at an internal town hall meeting. The movie showed the company’s successes in Colorado as the biggest gas and oil producer in the state. Less than thirty minutes later, executives said they were going to cut staff around the world by up to twenty percent.
The American company Chevron is going to fire a lot of people from their gas stores
Chevron recently said it would be letting go of up to 8,000 workers, which is about a fifth of its staff. This comes after a year in which oil prices mostly stayed between $70 and $80 per barrel. Even though oil prices and processing margins were lower than the previous year, Chevron made $18.3 billion in profits for the whole year of 2024, down from $24.7 billion the previous year. In October 2023, the second-largest U.S. oil producer agreed to buy the New York-based oil company Hess for $53 billion. This was done to get a big piece of Guyana’s rich oilfields. But Hess’s partners in Guyana, Exxon Mobil, and CNOOC, fought the deal in court. The layoffs ended a tough 18 months for the company.
Four people who work at Chevron told Reuters that the layoffs were generally expected. Some even agreed that the change had to be made to compete with Exxon Mobile and other companies. There was a Chevron worker who asked to stay anonymous because they weren’t allowed to speak in public. I think this will help them. Even though it’s tough, we are the last majors to be cut. Everyone was interested in when Chevron would do something. Also, in November, Chevron said it planned to cut costs by up to $3 billion by 2026. One way it planned to do this was by changing where and how it did business.
A Chevron official said that the reorganization will make the company more productive and get better results. The spokesperson said, “The choice to reduce our staff is not an easy one, even though these changes are necessary.” A story from August on Reuters said that the UK-based oil company Shell planned to cut the number of people working on oil and gas exploration and production by 20% as a way to save money. BP, a competing UK giant, said last month that it would cut 3,000 contractor jobs and let go of about 4,700 employees. Because the oil and gas business goes through cycles, three Chevron workers said they had been laid off more than once during their jobs. One of them said that getting fired during the COVID-19 outbreak was worse.
The estimate for global fuel demand is still not clear because of the sharp rise in sales of electric vehicles in China, which is the biggest importer of crude oil in the world. This has been driving up oil consumption for more than ten years. Nick Hummel, an equity expert at Edward Jones, said that the lack of certainty about China’s economy and demand around the world could keep oil prices low in the future. When oil prices drop, a lot of people are usually laid off in the oil business. An employee of Chevron said they were upset that the company was letting people go when prices were pretty stable.
Who should be blamed for the fuel shop layoffs that are coming up?
Employees asked during the town hall meeting if Chevron management would take the blame for how badly the company was doing. Vice president of Chevron’s Rockies business unit Kim McHugh read the questions they had sent in. CEO Mike Wirth stressed how important it was for the Chevron leadership team to be open and take action. He also said that the company would make decision-makers more clear about their jobs and hold them accountable. According to McHugh, staff members want to know that the most recent change will work after several others have failed in the past.
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