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Norway’s oil services firm Aker to slash up to 900 jobs

Norwegian oil services company Aker Solutions said on Friday it would cut up to another 900 jobs, meaning it will have shed more than one in ten jobs since oil prices began sliding in 2014.

Published: 15 January 2016 15:56 CET

Norway's oil services firm Aker to slash up to 900 jobs

Aker Solutions CEO Luis Araujo. Photo: Fredrik Varfjell / NTB scanpix

The group said it was reorganising its maintenance, modifications and operations business where around 5,000 of its overall 16,000-strong workforce is employed.

It follows the recent loss of a big maintenance contract with Norwegian oil giant Statoil.

“The workforce reductions will be made through regular employee turnover, reassignments to other parts of the company and redundancies,” Aker Solutions said in a statement.

The company had since July 2014 already reduced its workforce in Norway by around 1,300 permanent and temporary jobs.

Norway's economy is heavily dependent on the oil sector which accounts for more than 20 percent of its gross domestic product.

The slowdown in the oil sector has already led to the loss of 30,000 jobs since January 2014 and the Nordic country's current 4.6-percent unemployment rate is the highest in a decade.

Crude prices have shed three-quarters of the value in 18 months and dropped under $30 this week for the first time for 12 years.

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NGOs take Norway to European Court over Arctic oil exploration

Northern Norway. Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash.

It’s the latest turn in a legal tussle between environmental organisations Greenpeace and Young Friends of the Earth Norway on one side and the Norwegian state on the other.

The organisations are demanding the government cancel 10 oil exploration licenses in the Barents Sea awarded in 2016, arguing it was unconstitutional.

Referring to the Paris Agreement, which seeks to limit global warming to less than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the organisations claim that the oil licenses violated article 112 of Norway’s constitution, guaranteeing everyone the right to a healthy environment.”

The six activists, alongside Greenpeace Nordic and Young Friends of the Earth Norway, hope that the European Court of Human Rights will hear their case and find that Norway’s oil expansion is in breach of human rights,” Greenpeace said in a statement.

In December, Norway’s Supreme Court rejected the claim brought by the organisations, their third successive legal defeat.

READ MORE: Norway sees oil in its future despite IEA’s warnings

While most of the judges on the court agreed that article 112 could be invoked if the state failed to meet its climate and environmental obligations– they did not think it was applicable in this case.

The court also held that the granting of oil permits was not contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights, in part because they did not represent “a real and immediate risk” to life and physical integrity.

“The young activists and the environmental organisations argue that this judgment was flawed, as it discounted the significance of their environmental constitutional rights and did not take into account an accurate assessment of the consequences of climate change for the coming generations,” Greenpeace said.

On Friday, the Norwegian government unveiled a white paper on the country’s energy future, which still includes oil exploration despite a warning from the International Energy Agency (IEA).

The IEA recently warned that all future fossil fuel projects must be scrapped if the world is to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

The Norwegian case is an example of a global trend in which climate activists are increasingly turning to courts to pursue their agenda.

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