It makes perfect sense that you'd need to pay somebody lots of money to get them to work on an offshore drilling platform:
- You're stuck there with basically nothing to do but work for long periods of time. Can't go visit your girlfriend, etc.
- The work is dangerous, and you could get injured or killed.
- There are probably not too many people who have the necessary skills and experience to do the work safely, which puts the employees at a market advantage. Also, you can't outsource the work by sending the offshore rig to a country where labor is cheaper. It's got to be located on top of the gas field that you own.
I'd guess that whoever posted this article wanted to draw a parallel with Silicon Valley, where CEOs were colluding to drive down costs via an anti-poaching cartel because they thought the cost of labor was "too high".
For reference, A$400,000 is equivalent to US$371,600. There's no inherent reason why average developer salaries couldn't get that high if the combination of supply and demand were right. As long as employees' work brings in more revenue to the company than the cost of the employees, employing them would be profitable for the company (although maybe the poor CEOs might have to downsize to smaller yachts and aircraft since there would be less left over for them).
By that logic there are tons of other careers that should involve very high salaries: long haul trucker, anything on a cruise ship, Antarctic researcher, stationed on a military submarine, forest firefighter, commercial fisherman, etc etc etc. By and large oil platform gigs pay a lot because oil companies have an enormous amount of resources and no one wants to do the work because they're passionate or patriotic.
It's also the draw for men to work on the platform. No matter how much money you make, if you're miserable you won't do the job. Great food makes happy stomachs.
I'd bet it's for retention, otherwise guys will do just one tour and leave.
From what I've read, for people like cooks and galley hands, the work on an offshore rig isn't really much more dangerous than the corresponding jobs on a cruise ship or a merchant ship, so it is not at all clear that danger pay explains why kitchen and laundry workers are paid so much on oil rigs.
Highlighting a so-called skills shortage and making the case for government intervention on behalf of the corporations to help reduce "costs" (how much they pay their employees).
Of course the great irony is that the same corporations calling for government intervention to help restrict pay would be screaming bloody murder if the government acted to curtail their profit margins in any way.
You used to hear this sort of thing about UAW employees all the time, but it was always exaggerated. The corporate PR people would extrapolate a week of exceptional overtime pay to a whole year, and/or they'd include benefits and payroll taxes in the dollar figures, for example.
So I have no facts to add but I'm skeptical anyway.
I mean, sign me up, I'll do your laundry for A$324,000, OK? No? Yeah, didn't think so.
- You're stuck there with basically nothing to do but work for long periods of time. Can't go visit your girlfriend, etc.
- The work is dangerous, and you could get injured or killed.
- There are probably not too many people who have the necessary skills and experience to do the work safely, which puts the employees at a market advantage. Also, you can't outsource the work by sending the offshore rig to a country where labor is cheaper. It's got to be located on top of the gas field that you own.
I'd guess that whoever posted this article wanted to draw a parallel with Silicon Valley, where CEOs were colluding to drive down costs via an anti-poaching cartel because they thought the cost of labor was "too high".
For reference, A$400,000 is equivalent to US$371,600. There's no inherent reason why average developer salaries couldn't get that high if the combination of supply and demand were right. As long as employees' work brings in more revenue to the company than the cost of the employees, employing them would be profitable for the company (although maybe the poor CEOs might have to downsize to smaller yachts and aircraft since there would be less left over for them).