Aramco staff head back to offices, work sites

Bengaluru

TENS of thousands of Saudi Aramco employees are streaming back to offices and work sites across the kingdom after weathering the coronavirus - and one of the oil industry's most turbulent periods - at their homes.

As technology companies like Apple Inc and Google continue to keep staff at home due to the pandemic, about 75 per cent of the state-owned oil giant's employees are starting to return this week to their normal workplaces. Only staff with critical roles have remained at their posts since March, Aramco said in its weekly newsletter Arabian Sun.

Apple, which overtook Aramco last month as the world's biggest company by market value, is unlikely to fully re-open its offices in the Americas this year. Alphabet Inc's Google is letting staff work from home until July 2021. Oil major BP Plc will allow a mixture of working at home and from the office and could sell its London headquarters as a result.

Unlike technology workers, the oil industry needs people on site to operate drilling rigs, run processing plants and load tankers. Yet, Exxon Mobil Corp, Chevron Corp, Royal Dutch Shell Plc and even state-run peers like Libya's National Oil Corp have sent staff home or shut offices or fields in response to real or suspected coronavirus infections.

"Aramcons", as the Saudi company's 80,000-odd workers call themselves, are coming back to socially distanced desks, conference calls instead of in-person meetings and hand-sanitiser stations - a similar environment to that of other companies seeking to create a semblance of workplace normality amid the virus. At Aramco's campus-like headquarters in Dhahran on the Persian Gulf coast and at refineries, plants and wellheads across the country, they're also returning to a changed business.

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Oil lost almost three quarters of its value when the coronavirus went global and is still down about 30 per cent this year. That's after the Opec+ coalition, led by Saudi Arabia and Russia, agreed to make unprecedented cuts in production. Prior to that April agreement, the Saudis boosted daily output to a record of more than 12 million barrels during a brief oil-price war.

Since this year's plunge in crude, the company has reorganised top management, restructured business units, and suspended some drilling and projects. It also took the rare step of laying off hundreds of Aramcons, mostly foreigners. BLOOMBERG