The layoffs of hundreds of workers at Halliburton’s El Reno operations center last week are not the only ones to hit the Houston-based company.
Halliburton is cutting more jobs in Bakersfield, Calfornia where 70 employees are being let go right before Christmas.
Halliburton didn’t confirm any time for the layoffs but issued a statement. The oil field services company cited customer activity levels in other recent reductions and consolidations, including the decision to shut down the El Reno operations, a move that affected 800 workers in several states.
Some of the 800 were offered jobs at another command center in Duncan, Oklahoma. They weren’t the only ones to be affected. In the second quarter of the year, Halliburton trimmed 8 percent of its North American workforce followed by a move to lay off 650 people at its Rocky Mountain operations in Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico and North Dakota.
Although he did not explicitly indicate a trend of job cuts would continue, Halliburton CFO Lance Loeffler said at a Houston Business Journal energy panel in November that headcount reductions come as the company aims to reduce costs.
“We don’t want to stack crews today that aren’t earning their cost of capital. That’s not what we’re in business to do,” he said at the time. “We’re doing that today because that is the stark reality of what pricing has done. That is what it has forced us to do.”
Reuters reports that Halliburton vowed to cut more costs to help realize $300 million in annualized savings after the company’s third-quarter profit dropped.
Halliburton is far from the only company in the oil and gas industry facing such contractions in recent months. A survey by the Dallas Federal Reserve found that 23 percent of Texas companies in oil and gas reported third-quarter layoffs, with two-thirds of those in oil field services reporting reduced headcounts.