Posted on 04/20/2014 10:24:03 AM PDT by mdittmar
Environmental groups cringe as some trade unions support oil and gas drilling, pipelines
PITTSBURGH (AP) -- After early complaints that out-of-state firms got the most jobs, some local construction trade workers and union members in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia say they're now benefiting in a big way from the Marcellus and Utica Shale oil and gas boom.
That vocal support from blue-collar workers complicates efforts by environmentalists to limit the drilling process known as fracking.
"The shale became a lifesaver and a lifeline for a lot of working families," said Dennis Martire, the mid-Atlantic regional manager for the Laborers' International Union, or LIUNA, which represents workers in numerous construction trades.
Martire said that as huge quantities of natural gas were extracted from the vast shale reserves over the last five years, union work on large pipeline jobs in Pennsylvania and West Virginia has increased significantly. In 2008, LIUNA members worked about 400,000 hours on such jobs; by 2012, that had risen to 5.7 million hours.
Nationally, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says total employment in the nation's oil and gas industry rose from about 120,000 in early 2004 to about 208,000 last month. Less than 10 percent of full-time oil and gas industry workers are represented by unions.
Alex Paris, head of a Pittsburgh-area contracting firm founded by his grandfather in 1928, said many of the jobs in the early years of the boom went to out-of-state workers, perhaps because the biggest drilling firms come from Texas and Oklahoma. Now there's been a shift to hiring local contractors that use union labor.
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
The unions that count nowadays though are the public employee unions, and they probably couldn’t care less about fracking.
This is just awful. What will Matt Damon and John Krasinski say? They’ll be so disappointed...
Well,we know where union dues end up.
What do they care, as long as the checks for the Saudis clear.
For the umpteenth time, "fracking" is NOT a drilling process.
It is a completion technique.
The wellbore has to be present to frac the formation.
The key tech is horizontal drilling, which means that under ideal circumstances, instead of four to 50 (or more) feet of wellbore going through productive rock to frac, there are up to 9500 ft. (1280 acre spacing) or more of potentially productive wellbore to complete in that stratum.
Fracking (fraccing) has been around for a long time, it is the advances in horizontal drilling technology, including MWD, which has made the boom possible. Frac technique has just been adapted to enhance production in longer wellbores.
(The best thing we could do would be to keep welfare recipients from voting, as we do felons. A number of states had such "pauper laws" as recently as the 1930s. I'm not aware of such laws ever being found unconstitutional.)
It’s VERY GOOD news. If unions start to break with the Dems, then they are FINISHED.
The oil companies were very smart here. Drilling is very capital-intensive, with on-site labor costing next to nothing. So spend the extra money to get the unions to your side, and take the political goodies that come with them to the bank.
If that is true, before long we should see unions fighting other unions,we shall see.
This is almost as as much fun as watching “animal rights” filthbags duke it out with pervert rights filthbags over the use of animals in medical research.
I asked her about what this might do to the few well paying longshoremen jobs this port still has and she said straight out - she doesn't care. Her vision is to turn the port in to a people's agricultural field.
What is a “fundamentally transformative community organizer who promised that energy prices would naturally skyrocket, but also has deep support from unions of all stripe (mostly in the government sector)” to do????
As was stated here, the gov unions seem to care little about fracking or energy prices or enviro-constituency. So the base zippy has to appeal to are envirewhackos. Bet he, rather his three-ring, 24hour, all progressive-all the time, damn the constitution full speed ahead, administration will gaff off the private unions to please the stinky hippies.
Look for no movement on the keystone until 2016 when Feyd Rautha Harkonnen (shrillary) is set to replace the beast Raban.
That is of course if the fremen in the west don’t get uppity.
KYPD
Reminds me of a number of years back in our area when hearings were being held about ocean dumping. There were screaming matches between the left (union members whose work included ocean dumping transport) and the far left (enviro-whackos). Made me smile a lot, and triggered a letter to the editor which is somewhere in my print archives (my pre-computer days).
If I find it while this thread is still alive I’ll look it over to see if it is worth posting. Our local Gannett newsrag printed it, but that was way back when!
Fracking was started in Oklahoma in the 1960’s.
Interesting that no one raised hell until recently.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.