Wood Group to shed several jobs soon

Wood Group Pressure Control in Shawnee recently told its employees the third shift at the plant will cease to exist come next week, the plant’s manager said Thursday afternoon.
Reza Hajjari, the plant’s manager, said the elimination of the third shift will only affect around 10 percent of his workforce, which he estimated on Thursday to stand at around 150 employees. Hajjari said there are around 15 to 17 workers on the third shift.
“We will be absorbing about half of them into the first and second shifts, but, unfortunately, we are letting a few people go,” he said.
Employees on the third shift already know they’re going to be affected, but Hajjari said he has yet to tell them which ones will be laid off and which ones will be “absorbed” into the other shifts.
Shawnee’s Wood Group Pressure Control facility specializes in the production of valves and well heads used to control the flow of oil out of the ground once a formation has been drilled, Hajjari said.
“If people are drilling, we are selling,” he said. “If people don’t drill, we don’t sell.”
Hajjari said the layoffs are in response to the plummeting rig count in the United States. He said that on April 24 the U.S. rig count stood at 955. Just a year earlier the count was 1,842 - a 48 percent reduction.
“Rig count is a leading indicator for us, “ Hajjari said. “We set up our budget and make plans based on the rig count.”
As for the near future, well, things don’t look much brighter. At least not in the short term.
“They’re saying it’s going to get worse and there’s speculation that it’s going to go down to 800 and then maybe get back to around 1,000 by the end of the year,” Hajjari said.
In the meantime, Hajjari said he’s working hard to make sure the Shawnee facility weathers the recession as well as it can.
“Overall, the cuts we are doing are very minimal,” he said. “We’re trying to isolate the facility in Shawnee to protect what we have here.”