Joel Julien

joel.julien@guardian.co.tt

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley says bpTT of­fi­cials have told him they will soon be cut­ting 25 per cent or a quar­ter of their work­force.

How­ev­er, bpTT’s vice pres­i­dent of cor­po­rate op­er­a­tions Giselle Thomp­son said while cuts are ex­pect­ed to be made, the ex­act num­ber of jobs that will be af­fect­ed lo­cal­ly has not been de­ter­mined as yet.

Speak­ing to Ira Math­ur in an ex­clu­sive Guardian Me­dia in­ter­view at White­hall, Port-of-Spain, last Wednes­day, Row­ley told of the im­pend­ing job loss at the coun­try's largest nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­er when asked about how COVID-19 had af­fect­ed this coun­try's econ­o­my.

“Many gas-based in­dus­tries in Pt Lisas ap­pear to have moth­balled their plants. COVID has hit us hard, shrink­ing our econ­o­my by 10 per cent, even as we con­tin­ue to sup­port our hard­est-hit cit­i­zens at a big cost. As an oil and gas pro­duc­er, our pro­duc­tion and sale of oil has dropped glob­al­ly. COVID-19 came at a time when our oil and gas prices were al­ready soft­en­ing and had the ef­fect of fur­ther re­duc­ing con­sump­tion of methanol, urea am­mo­nia, LNG, oil and gas. It was a per­fect storm. Some plants in Point Lisas have shut down," Row­ley said. (See full in­ter­view on pages 6 & 7)

"Just to­day, I was ad­vised by BP Trinidad they are re­duc­ing their staff by 25 per cent. All gas and oil mar­kets are ex­pe­ri­enc­ing the same thing due to re­duced de­mand. Thou­sands of planes are on the ground, few­er cars are mov­ing about." he said.

Guardian Me­dia reached out to Thomp­son to get some clar­i­fi­ca­tion on the sit­u­a­tion at bpTT.

Thomp­son said ear­li­er this year, BP’s chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer Bernard Looney spoke of the im­pend­ing job loss­es glob­al­ly and that it can be as much as 25 per cent.

“Trinidad does not have a tar­get per say and we are cur­rent­ly work­ing through the process for our Trinidad op­er­a­tions. We, there­fore, can­not con­firm yet if that will mean 25 per cent for Trinidad but we do know there will be lo­cal im­pacts,” Thomp­son said.

“The news is not new, as this was an­nounced months ago but in a re­cent con­ver­sa­tion with the PM we re­mind­ed him that we are cur­rent­ly in the mid­dle of that process. This should be com­plet­ed be­fore the end of the year.”

In June, in an ad­dress to all staff, Looney an­nounced plans to cuts 10,000 jobs glob­al­ly fol­low­ing the fall in de­mand for oil be­cause of COVID-19.

“We in­tro­duced a three-month re­dun­dan­cy freeze back in March to ease some of the im­me­di­ate wor­ry for peo­ple. That mora­to­ri­um ends to­day,” Looney said.

Looney said most of the job loss would be of­fice-based.

"We will now be­gin a process that will see close to 10,000 peo­ple leav­ing bp - most by the end of this year. The ma­jor­i­ty of peo­ple af­fect­ed will be in of­fice-based jobs. We are pro­tect­ing the front­line of the com­pa­ny and, as al­ways, pri­ori­tis­ing safe and re­li­able op­er­a­tions," he said.

Looney said the oil price had plunged well be­low the lev­el the en­er­gy gi­ant need­ed to turn a prof­it, adding it cost US$22 bil­lion a year to run the com­pa­ny and around US$8 bil­lion of that was "peo­ple costs.”

Looney said the aim was to dri­ve down costs by $2.5 bil­lion in 2021 and it "will like­ly have to go even fur­ther."

"We will work ex­cep­tion­al­ly hard to make sure the process is fair and ob­jec­tive," Looney said.

"The most se­nior lev­els of bp will bear the biggest im­pacts. As an ex­am­ple, our new Tier 2 struc­ture has more than halved the num­ber of most se­nior-lev­el jobs - and we are look­ing to re­duce the num­ber of group lead­ers over­all by around one third."

Looney said while it was a dif­fi­cult de­ci­sion it is a nec­es­sary one.