Jim T's Clarification

Jim T. in fact did respond to my email and I thank him for that. He clarified what he meant within the article that he wrote. Us oilfield wives tend to get very defensive and protective of our husbands and families.

I pasted Jim's response below. Thanks for the invite to tell our story but it just isn't my thing to be in the spotlight like that. We are just another newlywed couple trying to start a family and find our way. 

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Hi Andrea,

Thanks for writing. I did read the article. I understand the reaction, but I want to assure you, I wrote the piece not to mock or look down on oil/gas industry workers, but to show a national audience how tough of a break they’ve gotten as prices crashed.

A few facts, I think, are really critical to the piece. The first is that there remains a huge gap *on average* between the earnings of college graduate and non-college graduates in America (see: here - http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm) – and over the last decade-plus, non-college-graduates, especially men, have seen their incomes fall. We’ve lost millions of factory jobs, for example, that used to pay solid wages for those workers. Here’s a piece I did earlier this year on a study that shows one look at those stats:http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/03/06/the-21st-century-has-been-terrible-for-working-americans/

The second is that, indeed, more than 9 out of every 10 oil/gas workers doesn’t have a college degree. (The source for that is an analysis of Labor Department data by economists at the Brookings Institution, which they did at my request – I could send you the raw files if you’d like to see them.)

The third is that compared to the typical job for a similarly educated worker *not* in oil and gas, jobs in the industry pay really, really well. As you say, that pay reflects a lot of things, including how hard the work is and how hard the job can be on the worker’s family.

So what we meant in the story, when we said ‘lottery ticket’, is that an oil/gas job is a rare opportunity for a non-college educated worker to earn a lot more money than he could elsewhere in the economy. Not that he wasn’t working hard to make that money, just that, like a winning ticket, those jobs are really hard to find (in the context of the entire national labor market).

I would add that I would never call your family, or your fellow oilfield families, trash. I grew up in a small town in Oregon where a lot of my high school classmates’ parents worked in the timber industry, at a time when that industry, which had paid solid wages, was shrinking rapidly. It was devastating for those families, who worked very, very hard; a lot of what I write today, about the plight of workers and the middle class in this country, is rooted in that experience. I try to tell stories about people who work hard, whom the economy has failed for one reason or another. I’m sorry this one didn’t come across that way to you and your friends.

Thanks for your time. I hope you and your husband make it through the tough time in the industry, and that it recovers soon. And if you all would ever like to tell me your story, I’d love to hear it and very likely write about it.

Best regards,

Jim