Oil Jobs Start Drying Up
It’s been a Spindletop-like five years for the American oilman. As fracking projects mounted from the expanse of south Texas to North Dakota’s Drift Prairie, hiring did too. Last year, about 198,000 workers were employed in oil and gas extraction, the most since 1987. Another 325,500 were working in the industry’s support services, the most since the Labor Department began tracking those figures in 1990. Combined, some 523,500 were on company payrolls in 2014, more than twice the number a decade earlier.