Sunoco has announced that they are idling the the Marcus Hook refinery on March 1, 2012. I’m one of the 500 employees who received a virtual pink slip when I arrived at work on Thursday afternoon.
Up to now, I haven’t used the Chester City Blog to discuss my job, but with so much focus on Sunoco now, I’ve been considering sharing my first hand observations of how me and my coworkers are coping with this situation.
Let me know through your comments if you’d be interested in reading about this. That will determine if I write on it or not.
Any idea if this closure has anything to do with the new pollution controls that were supposed to be instlled by teh end of the year?
ReplyDeleteWho knows. Based on what I've read, the refinery is bleeding money. If they were making money, the expense of mandated pollution controls wouldn't be an issue.
ReplyDeletePolitically, President Obama is torn between maintaining jobs and making the air a little cleaner. It cost a lot of money to make the air a little cleaner and it's resulting in a lot of companies having to go out of business because they can't afford it.
Republicans are about big business and democrats are big on environmental issues. If President Obama caters to his base, the environment will win and a lot of workers will lose. He's hinting of loosing up on the mandates, but that's risking in an election year.
If these pollution controls were to make the air a lot cleaner, it would be a no brainer to install them. But to insist that industry must pay, in some cases, hundreds of millions of dollars, to make the air a little cleaner is putting a lot of people out of work.
In Sunoco's case, in the old days of huge profits, it would have still been a big cost item which doesn't return a penny of profit to the bottom line, but they would have likely paid for it like they have all the other environmental controls mandated over the years.
In my opinion, it was probably a factor but not the deal breaker.
Tell us about it, Stefan. Is anybody helping people line up other work? What are you planning to do?
ReplyDeleteThere have been no career assistance set up for union covered employees. Since there is still an opportunity for the refinery to be sold, I doubt if any career assistance would be made available before March 1, if it will be made available at all.
ReplyDeleteHowever, my co-workers are busy helping each other identify other opportunities in the petro-chemical industry, creating resumes, and discovering LinkedIn.
For me, I'll be looking at opportunities in this area which will likely land me in an industry other than petro-chemical since most of those jobs are out of state.