Oil and Gas Job Promises Out of Reach for People of Color
Terry L. Jones, Floodlight | October 6, 2023 | Louisiana Illuminator
There’s an unspoken promise when an industry moves into any community: We will disrupt your lives, but in exchange we will provide good-paying jobs.
Except, according to new research shared exclusively with Floodlight, in Louisiana’s majority Black communities in the area known as “Cancer Alley,” because of its high concentration of polluting industries, the majority of jobs go to white workers. Similar disparities occur in minority-dominant communities along Texas’ Gulf Coast, where the majority of workers are white.
“If one group gets all the pollution and another group gets all the jobs, it’s not really a tradeoff anymore,” said Kimberly Terrell, director of community engagement and a staff scientist with the Tulane University Environmental Law Clinic who led the research team.
The highest disparity was found in St. John the Baptist Parish, home to the third largest oil refinery in the nation, and plants that make neoprene and absorbent material for diapers.
There, people of color represent nearly 70% of the working-age population but make up only 28% of the manufacturing workforce, according to initial data from Tulane. That disparity is even greater with respect to higher-paying jobs, such as managers, sales workers and technicians. Minorities hold only 19% of those positions.
“I would hear the people here say these plants keep coming but they’re not hiring Black people,” said retired educator Stephanie Aubert, who is Black and lives in St. John the Baptist Parish. “They’ll hire people from outside the parish before they hire us. That’s what they do to us.”
The second highest disparity was found in Jefferson County, Texas, where minorities represent 59% of the working age population but make up only 28% of the manufacturing workforce, according to the data.
Industry representatives who responded to Floodlight say they are working to increase diversity. Louisiana’s economic development agency, which gives industry generous incentives to locate in the state, says their hiring requirements don’t have any racial or location requirements.
Anne Rolfes, director of the nonprofit environmental advocacy group Louisiana Bucket Brigade, says community advocates have “known for a long time” that communities most deeply impacted by industry through toxic air emissions and other health risks are rarely offered the jobs industry and state leaders always promise whenever announcing new projects.
“The jobs claim is central to their existence,” Rolfes said. “Now we have proof” that communities aren’t benefiting from the industry, and are being disproportionately harmed by pollution.
In Texas, there are similar stories. In 2019, Darrell Kyle, a former union president for United Steelworkers Local 13-243 in Beaumont, was told by companies there they didn’t hire minorities because they typically couldn’t pass aptitude or drug tests. Kyle, who worked for ExxonMobil for 30 years, thought he could help. He recruited more than 20 people of color with criminal backgrounds or from low-income households and worked with a local nonprofit to provide vocational training designed to steer them through the hiring process at the ExxonMobil plant in Jefferson County.
“They didn’t hire any of those people, and none of the people they hired for that mechanical class were from Jefferson County,” Kyle said. “It’s a continued theme with these companies.”
ExxonMobil did not respond to a request for comment about the program.
