The wages for oil and gas in Siberia
Posted by Heading Out on July 22, 2006 - 12:07pm
Under the system, one of the harshest in the oil industry, only 30 percent of wages are fixed. The other 70 percent consists of bonuses that can be taken away at any time, depending on an employee's performance, Zakharkin said by telephone from Surgut on Thursday.At present the article quotes the average salary as being some $630 a month, although they are asking for a 50% raise. This was disputed by a company spokeswoman"Low wages, fines and boorish behavior" by managers are the bane of the workers' lives, Zakharkin said, adding that the protests' aim is simply to get a hearing with the company.
Worsening conditions are affecting morale, Zakharkin said. "How will they raise birth rates if people are crestfallen and feeling depressed?" he said, in a reference to the government's plan to combat demographic decline.
"We all want a better salary," said Raisa Khodchenko, a company spokeswoman. "I also want to go the Bahamas and the Caribbean every year."These salaries are quite a bit less than those being made in the gas fields being developed by Gazprom where salaries up at the edge of the Arctic Circle are significantly higher.She said workers' wages were raised by 20 percent in January and would be raised by another 20 percent in October. The fixed part of salaries was 38 percent, not 30 percent as the workers claimed, she said.
The average salary is about 28,000 rubles, ($1,040) per month and workers lost bonuses for good reasons, Khodchenko said.
"Working for Gazprom is considered prestigious." The company bills itself as the "Pride of the Nation."The Business Week article has another interesting view on what might be the future prospects for Gazprom and the Russian President.The Communist Party's state socialism dissolved nearly two decades ago, but Gazprom's corporate paternalism softens the rigors of life in a region the locals refer to simply as "the North." While the average Russian worker makes $350 a month, gas field technicians here take home up to $3,000. Roadside billboards proclaim "Glory to the gas workers!" Nationwide, Gazprom has 330,000 employees.
Workers in Novy Urengoy live with their families in apartment blocks painted shades of blue, pink, and yellow. Gazprom covers 97% of the cost of running 14 kindergartens, charging employees only 100 rubles, or $4, a month for child care. It provides interest-free housing loans, free medical care, and heavily subsidized overseas vacations.
Dmitry Medvedev, another member of the St. Petersburg clique and chairman of Gazprom's board, also serves as Putin's first Deputy Prime Minister.The article also points out the rapid gasification program that it going on in Russia and the considerable savings that will come from the switch for Russian consumers, since they pay a considerably lower rate than foreign consumers.Gazprom's political heft would be underscored if, as is rumored in Moscow, Putin becomes CEO after stepping down from the presidency in 2008. (Putin has denied any such plan.) Medvedev, meanwhile, is widely seen as a leading candidate to replace his boss as President in two years.
By the end of 2006 all nine of Kalyazin's heating plants are to be converted to gas from fuel oil, which sells for about $280 a ton. The equivalent amount of gas--1,000 cubic meters--costs just $93 for industrial users and $56 for residential ones. Consumers will pay just over a dollar each month for gas to power their stoves, compared with $4.50 for bottled propane.Electric bills will decline sharply thanks to the fact that residents will no longer have to use electric water heaters. "I'm proud of it because it's our Russian company," local hotel manager Irina Zhupanova says of Gazprom. "For daily life, of course [gas] is a big plus," says resident Elena Chertovskikh.
With Gazprom board chairman Medvedev maneuvering ahead of the 2008 presidential election, Russia is gasifying furiously. Kalyazin is one of 1,120 towns and villages the company has promised to hook up under its 2005-2007 program. The miracle of gas is to be bestowed on 60% of all Russians, compared with 53% in 2005.
At the same time Gazprom continues to spend its profits on acquiring other company assets, in the latest case shares in Gazprom Neft the oil company, which Yukos had owned. The price appears to be about a third of the value of the shares, from the article, but when you have as much control of the Russian energy business as Gazprom is now acquiring then I guess the rules change.
At the same time the growth in domestic consumption that is apparently currently in progress, can only give a bit more concern to those in the West who are going to be increasingly dependant on natural gas supplies from Russia, where investments in the developments of new deposits seem to be taking second place to other interests.
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So I guess they are subsidizing gas a litle bit.
In summary, it says that Russian oil production is stagnating and " it does not appear that there will be substantive improvements in 2007 and beyond" despite significant increase in rig count.
Thanks for posting this story. I became aware of this situation about a year and half ago and have since read everything I could get hands on to understand this plan. For decades now, the MNCs have been working behind the scenes with their political and media lap dogs to implement this far reaching agenda.
A North American Union and borderless continent would make implementation of a sustainable free-market system unlikely given the weakening effect this would have on the ability of citizens to adopt practical solutions in their own communities and own states. This is due to continental regulations and laws decided by the "council" that are expected to overrule any and all local laws and regulations.
The likelihood of balkanization of cultures will also make the job of getting a continental consensus of the electorate virtually impossible.
It is not only possible the power elite are trying to eliminate our borders, it is in the works right now. The principle backers are the members of the Council on Foreign Relations, of which most high ranking politicians are members of or affiliated with. This goal is supported by both the neoconservatives and neoliberals.
Get informed. Start by reading several books on the history, process, and goals of globalization. I must have read 40 books and hundreds of analyses by political scientists and historians to understand what was happening and why.
Although not a scholarly text, I found Crossing the Rubicon very illuminating in its probing of the corruption and scheming that goes on regularly by high ranking pols and CFR members. Rubicon's author, Michael Ruppert, may seem to jump to conclusions but his work as an investigative journalist is topnotch. Historian Kevin Phillip's new book American Theocracy is also good primer on the hubris of our political elite and how their reckless behavior has made peak oil a much more dangerous proposition for us all.
The WTO is pretty well know for over-riding local democratic governmental regulations and such, is it not?
And plans for significantly altering the relationships between the three NA countries have been in the works for some time as well, I believe, and supported by WTO.
This CFR document on "Creating a North American Community" might be a place to start investigating.
http://www.cfr.org/publication.html?id=7912
Sorry to continue the off-topic tanget -- this might be a good topic for a seperate post or to take to Drumbeat.
And now, back to Siberia!
Corrected figures for each month become available on the 26th of the following month and these data are plotted here on the upper graph along with the previous 12 months in thousand tonnes per day: http://www.oilcapital.ru/stat/stat_2/stat_2.shtml
Since it appears that Americans are on the threshold of hyperinflation, this will necessarily translate into U.S. workers increasingly disgruntled over inadequate pay raises.
This discontent by Russian oil workers is just a harbinger of things to come.
P.S. A big clue to rank and file Americans that inflation was about to take off should have been the Fed's decision to stop releasing M3 data.
The inflation is more discernible if one compares the prices in US$. Five years ago 1 square meter of average apartment in new housing blocs in the outskirts of Moscow costs $600-700. Today the price is $4000-4500.
Let me restate my position. Escalating fossil fuels prices have the potential to rapidly inflate not only energy prices but also those goods and services most directly dependent on ff - and that's a lot of g&s.
The potential for a weakened or collapsing dollar will magnify the problem for American consumers.
Some economists say that we have been in stagflation for several years but this has been masked by the deflated prices of goods from overseas, principally China. If energy and commodity prices soar, combined with higher transportation costs and a weakened dollar, then those cheap Chinese products may not be so cheap anymore.
A deep recession based on rapidly inflating ff prices could well bring a strange mix of high inflation and deflation (e.g. much lower housing prices from a burst housing bubble).
Hang on to your seat belts, folks.
I agree that stagflation is likely. I think we already have mild/early stagflation in the major economies but the numbers are distorted by the way the data is manipulated, primarily:
- substitution. i.e. one type of meat has gone up in price so lets make the consumer substitute that with a different cheaper meat and hence that is not inflation.
- hedonistic pricing. i.e. this product has gone up but we won't count that because it is presumed to be a better quality product.
The GDP is deflated by a figure that tends to be even lower than the manipulated inflation figures. So if you manipulate inflation down you are simultaneously manipulating GDP growth up. Hence the governments pretend inflation is less than what most people experience AND growth is higher than most people experience. It will be interesting to see, as the situation worsens, if and how they will continue to lie about it.Regards.
More importantly for a very significant portion of Russians their personal disposable income (PDI) is around 70% of take home AFTER paying off credit cards, mortgages and other debt. recent study suggested that the purchasing power of an avergae Muscovite (note that Moscow is a country-in-country) is in excess of the average Swede.
Indeed as GDP per capita is rising faster than ex-real estate core inflation it looks as though domestic (natural) gas prices will be allowed even faster than the current regulated tarrifs - and then you really will have a gas crisis in W. Europe as this post from an alter ego Russian bloggger highlights.
http://russtech.blogspot.com/2006/07/russian-gas-supply-vs-demand.html
The supply of experience people is clearly inadequate onshore U.S.A. The operator of a number of properties I have small fractional interests in has recently given his key employee a fairly significant piece of the action just to make certain that he does not entertain better offers.
Those who manage the oil can expect to call the shots in our dead dino "civilization'.
We're breaking new records for heat AND for energy consumption every day, tomorrow supposed to be even hotter and Monday hotter/even more energy use since it will be back to work for us proles.
Blackouts in southern San Jose, people keeling over due to heat, huge energy consumption, and tons of people on the road, even though it's a Spare The Air day.
Talkers on the radio demanding to know why, "they" made SUVs etc etc and caused global warming, how come "we" can't crank up the AC? Apparently no consciousness that "we" are "they". Aircon unit sales and usage are huge right now.
I've only been in the Bay Area 3 years so I'm not hoary old timer, but this heat is unlike anything I've experienced. And this heat is being experienced all over the US and I believe the world (not much gets through the censorship curtain, sorry, to readers outside the Evil Empire).
This is worthy of a thread..............
Weather underground reports that the highest temp ever for LA was reported July 22 -- 119 degrees.
http://www.cfr.org/publication.html?id=7912
Looks plenty warm in Russia, but that's not exactly on topic here either!
Unless the oil and gas workers in Siberia have to work in super-hot temperatures, I suppose....?
The next day, incredibly muggy air rolled in with lots of mid-level moisture and cloud cover above 10,000 feet. Dew points went into the low-to-mid 70s. Getting DPs above 65 F is pretty rare over here. With temps in the 80s and 90s, and the high humidity, we might as well have been in Baltimore or St Louis.
Low temps have been in the 70s due to the high dew points. Usually our lows are 55 to 60 when the highs are in the upper 90s.
Today, we could see 100 F again.
-best
I live in Minneapolis, MN now. It has been a bit warm here for the season, but seems to be much warmer to our south and west. The low temps are not quite as low as we like at night, to cool things down.
We've got it easy so far where I live.
I'm curious to know more about conditions in other places, and also what responses people see in others related to awareness of anthropogenic global climate change.
Also, I'm curious to see how people connect this to our fossil fuel habit....and to their own lives.
Perhaps one of the most obvious trends in the weather in the western Pacific Northwest is a fairly steady reduction of snow events over the last 1.5 centuries. Used to be, in the 1800s, that snow was a fairly common occurrence in the lowlands, such as the Willamette Valley, and deep snow events were much more common. Annual average snowfall is approaching zero these days, when it was something like 10 to 30 inches depending on location back in the 19th century.
For those interested, see George Miller's "Pacific Northwest Weather" (2004). He's developed his own method for rating winter weather severity for the PNW, and it shows some interesting trends.
Perhaps some of this is due to the urban heat island effect's influence on urban climatology stations, some may be due to long-term solar cycles, and, of course, we have the anthropogenic GHG inputs as well.
-best
I keep my house cool by having windows open between late evening and early morning and having them shut the rest of the time along with the curtains, especially on the side where the sun is. This keeps the house about 5C/10C cooler than outside. It is still warm inside late afternoon, but cooler than outside. I learnt these tips from the Greeks about how to cool a house. It is not hot enough, often enough for me to think about AC, although I much more prefer the cold to the heat.
Europe has been having the heat wave, but they generally have higher temperatures than the UK, so 30C is hot for UK, but cool for Spain and Greece.
Global warming is a big issue across Europe, but I don't think people really get the connection with fossil fuel habits though. If you told everyone that they cannot heat their home in winter, AC them in summer or have a foreign holiday to Spain in July/August to stop global warming, they would be very unhappy to say the least, but they do agree to do something about global warming, just as long as it doesn't affect them personally.
Last few weeks have been unusualy cool.
High today, so far, 80 F.