‘Killing good union jobs on day one with nothing to replace them is not building back better.’
It was about a year ago that Valarie Zupanik was laid off from her job doing payroll for a Montana trucking company. She’d worked there for a decade. She hadn’t seen it coming.
But finding new work didn’t take long.
Baker, the small Montana city near the North Dakota border where Zupanik lives, was in the path of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which was expected to pump 800,000 barrels of oil a day from Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf Coast. Within a few weeks of losing her job with the trucking company, Zupanik, 58, got a new one doing administrative work with a Texas firm that had been contracted to build workers’ camps — aka “man camps” — along the pipeline’s route.
“When I got the job, it was at the beginning of all this COVID stuff, and I was really lucky,” Zupanik told National Review. “It was a big deal to get for sure. It was a good job.”
But in January, having spent less than a year on the job, Zupanik was out of work again after Joe Biden revoked the pipeline’s permit with the stroke of a pen on his first day as president.
Now Zupanik is on unemployment. She’s looking for work, but without the promise of the pipeline, and with oil prices diminished during the COVID-19 pandemic, finding new work has proven more difficult for her this time around. “I’m looking, but it’s pretty bleak,” she said.
By nixing the Keystone XL, Biden killed an estimated 1,000 existing jobs, like Zupanik’s, and 10,000 more projected construction jobs. Workers at the Montana camp who spoke to National Review said they think those numbers are low, and they don’t reflect all of the other local businesses and workers who indirectly benefited from the pipeline’s construction.
Union leaders blasted Biden’s decision to cancel the pipeline, which they said was insulting and disappointing. They accused him of “pandering to environmental extremists.”
“Killing good union jobs on day one with nothing to replace them is not building back better,” said Terry O’Sullivan, president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America.
Ken Ehli, the mayor of Circle, a small town in rural McCone County, Mont., that was supposed to get 40 miles of pipeline, said he was expecting hundreds of workers, and as many as 1,000, to be based at the camp outside of town for a couple of years while the pipeline was being built.
Although it would have been temporary, having those workers in the area would have been a much-needed boost for the community’s small businesses, he said.
“Even though everything is self-sustained [in the camp], you’re still going to have people come in to go to your local grocery store. You’re still going to have people come in to buy their gas,” Ehli said. “It’s going to be a shot in the arm for all of this little community, all of our eating places, cafes, and stuff like that.”
Laura Holmlund, who owns the True Value hardware store in Circle, said she was looking forward to having the workers in town, shopping and eating. The town got a taste of what the pipeline could have brought with it when workers arrived last year to begin building a man camp outside of Circle.
“That was good for our business, because they came and got lots of odds and ends for their construction,” Holmlund said. “We were thankful for that boost.”
Holmlund said that not everyone in Circle was pro-pipeline, but her sense is that most were.
After building a camp in Baker, Zupanik and her colleagues moved on to build the camp outside of Circle. On an average day, there were about 75 workers there doing ground work, installing water and sewer pipes, and constructing modular buildings that make up the camps, she said.
Darryl Sellers was one of those workers, a superintendent who worked for the same Texas hospitality company as Zupanik. Sellers, who has 40 years of construction experience, had been building man camps around Montana since 2018. He also lost his job in January.
“I got a call from the home office, said ‘Job’s shut down. We have to lay you off,’” Sellers recalled. “And that’s about the long and short of it. They were cool about it. ‘I’m sure you saw the news. We have to lay you off.’ It was just that quick.”
He said he’s been looking for new work but hasn’t had any luck.
“Not even a whisper,” Sellers said. “I can’t even get anybody to talk to me. Give me your resume, and then you don’t hear anything from them.”
Sellers, 60, suspects companies are hiring younger workers who will work cheaper. He had intended to work another ten years and then work part-time from there.
He said the country’s political leaders have betrayed the workers, and questions why those workers maintain allegiances to politicians of either party.
“They hold on to the people who don’t care one lick about them, not one lick,” Sellers said.
Zupanik, who grew up in a community driven by the oil industry, doesn’t know what her next step is. Unemployment in her community, Fallon County, is low, but the community is small and there aren’t a lot of jobs that fit Zupanik’s qualifications, she said.
Although she knew the work of building the camps would eventually come to an end, she had her eyes on snagging a permanent job manning pump stations along the pipeline. But those jobs are gone now, and oil prices have plummeted.
“There really is no place to even apply for a job,” she said. “So am I going to have to move? I might not have a choice.”