FTS International Cuts 127 Jobs

Have you ever heard of FTS International? If you are like many people even if you have heard the name, or their previous name Frac Tech, then you are likely not to know what exactly the company does. For those of us who are not in the know here is a quick look at how the company describes itself, “…FTS International is a leading independent provider of well stimulation services for the oil and gas industry in the United States, with plans for international expansion. Exploration and production companies use our services primarily to enhance their recovery rates from wells drilled in shale and other unconventional reservoirs.” Apparently the company believes that they can continue to fulfill that mission without 127 of their workers.

The workers are set to be cut from facilities the company owns in Shreveport, Louisiana and Longview, Texas. The Longview facility will only lose about 38 workers from the facility. It Shreveport things are a bit different. That facility will lose just under 90 workers from the payrolls. This means that the cuts in Shreveport are enough to qualify as a mass layoff action. For those of you who are not familiar with the idea of a mass layoff action here is a look at how the federal government defines the term, “…mass layoff numbers are from establishments which have at least 50 initial claims for unemployment insurance (UI) filed against them during a 5-week period. Extended mass layoff numbers (issued quarterly) are from a subset of such establishments—where private sector nonfarm employers indicate that 50 or more workers were separated from their jobs for at least 31 days.” Mass layoffs have their own special rules about the amount of time that workers have to be notified in advance of the actual job losses. This is done to give the community time to prepare for the loss of income and hopefully help some workers to find new positions before they have to file for unemployment. This may mean that workers leave the two facilities on different dates.

A spokesperson for the company said the following about the job cuts, “Although this reduction in force affected only a tiny percentage of our total workforce of more than 4,000 people, we do regret that current market conditions have resulted in this impact on people and communities in northeast Louisiana and east Texas.” While it is good news for the economy on the whole that the company is not laying off a higher number of workers, or like so many facilities in the country simply shuttering its facilities completely, that news is unlikely to be very comforting to the workers who are now out of a job.

The cuts are also formidable parts of the workforce at those facilities and the percentage of jobs cut from those facilities is much higher than the overall from the company. The workers in Shreveport, who lost 89 jobs, will now be down to a headcount of 166. This means that more than one quarter of the facilities jobs were cut in this round of layoffs. In Longview, which lost 38 workers, only 115 jobs will remain, leaving the facility in a similar situation.