Why so quiet? And are you overpaid part 2.

We've had a few email inquiries wondering what's up? Why no posts? Well, a few reasons I guess... Firstly- a man's gotta sleep! But even in my sleep I dream of ways to ruin management's day, so that's what we've been up to.... It seems like our bosses got send a few emails that resulted in some rather hastily convened meetings at the end of this week..... Oops. We might have ruined some of the bosses' holiday plans- oh well. We'll discuss those emails more later next week once the sloooow slooooow gears of government finally catch up. 

In the meantime, let's talk about your pay…again.   Yes, yes, you’re an overpaid whiner, but let us discuss the details.

Our slope bosses have been going around and imploring you to “don't just look at the hourly wage, look at the whole compensation package! You have to compare THAT to our slope competitors, not just our wages.”  Honestly this kind of pissed me off because clearly they think we’re fucking morons who are too dumb consider our total compensation without their prompting.  But I guess I should stop getting offended that they think we’re total fucking morons, that’s never going to change.  Anyways, as management requested, we’ve dug into some detailed information regarding Hilcorp and Santos wages and benefits.

On a side note-  have you noticed how management keeps referencing this study that was done, but then claims not to know details about it, but simultaneously knows enough about the details to call you out and correct you if you say something inaccurate about the study?  Strange isn’t it?  If it REALLY shows we’re so over paid why don’t they actually lay out the data for us?  

So here we go-  we looked at Wages, 401K matching, Pensions, PTO, Bonuses, Night Shift Differentials, Holiday Pay, and Change Out Pay all using 2024 data.  Why didn’t we include healthcare costs like on our “Your Total Compensation” pie chart on WorkDay?  Because that makes it stupid complicated, and they didn’t use that either for the same reason.

So how’d we fare?  Are you really the 122% overpaid piece of shit management likes to claim you are?  The answer, when compared to our actual North Slope Producer Peers, is an indisputable No.   

Running the math for a “normal” step 5 equivalent operator, who works no overtime the total comp were all within 7%.  We compared EOA, WOA, Conoco and Santos. There were some differences in how things are structured; for instance Conoco and Santos have a higher hourly wage than EOA or WOA but they make an extra $8-14K a year in “change out pay”... yep, they get paid .25-1 hours/day in WOA and .75 hours a day in EOA for their drive time to and from work. EOA has a higher bonus potential than WOA, Santos or us.  WOA has pension type setup in addition to their 401K matching and so on.  But here is the bottom line:  We ranked 3rd highest in total compensation out of the 4 groups we looked at.  The highest came in at 102%, we were almost exactly at the average pay, the lowest was at 96%. 

And this doesn’t even begin to get into some things like the buy-in programs they are eligible for or the fact they started with years of “industry experience” credited to their PTO years of service calculations-  which is something ConocoPhillips does too- just not for us filthy blue coverall people on the slope… but those aren’t the tangibles-  our management begged us to look at the total compensation tangibles and we did just that. The results are crystal clear:  You make exactly median wage for being a slope based company operator.  

If you'd like the spreadsheets, email us and we can send you a copy. Unlike our bosses we don't claim information is legally restricted when its not.