ABSTRACT
The oil and gas industry has a history of booms and busts, imbalances in supply and demand, "crewing up" in expansive times, then retrenching and downsizing in bad times. Many in the industry labeled the early twenty-first century workforce turnover as "The Great Crew Change" and expressed concern that the skilled workers being laid off would be supplanted by inexperienced replacements or — given yet another episode of industry volatility — not replaced at all. This chapter examines the nature of work in the oilfield and the context within which it takes place, focusing on the offshore sector in the US Gulf of Mexico, carried out a number of studies sponsored by the US Department of the Interior's Minerals Management Service, retitled the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon explosion on April 20, 2010. The studies covered a number of field sites, from Brownsville, Texas, through south Louisiana and Mississippi, to Gulf Shores, Alabama.
