Petrobras Oil Worker Strike Shuts Offshore Platforms, Other Units
By Peter Millard
(Bloomberg) — Petroleo Brasileiro SA stated its oil and natural-gas manufacturing has been minimize due to a strike by employees protesting job losses, spending reductions and asset gross sales at Brazil’s state-controlled producer.
The greatest output cuts got here on Monday, the second day of the strike, when manufacturing fell 273,000 barrels a day, equal to 13 p.c of Brazil’s each day output, Rio de Janeiro-based Petrobras stated late Tuesday. Output rebounded however was nonetheless down 8.5 p.c from pre-strike ranges late Tuesday. Petrobras doesn’t count on the strike to disrupt its fuel-distribution community.
Those output estimates are lower than the five hundred,000 barrels a day that Brazil’s fundamental oil union, often called FUP, stated was affected. The strike shut 25 offshore platforms and pared output at eight different items at Brazil’s fundamental manufacturing zone within the Campos Basin, Francisco Jose de Oliveira, head of communications for the FUP oil union, stated Tuesday in a phone interview from Rio de Janeiro.
The strike is the most recent in a collection of setbacks for the Brazilian producer, which had its credit standing minimize to junk in September because it tries to cope with a collapse in commodity costs and a widening graft scandal that has resulted in a few of its suppliers in search of chapter safety. The firm is slashing investments and promoting belongings to scale back the largest debt load within the oil trade.
“Given Petrobras’s current financial constraints, an easy resolution seems difficult, unless the workers back down,” Bank of America Corp. analysts Frank McGann and Vicente Falanga Neto stated in a notice to purchasers. “This makes this strike more of a worry than those in past years” when employees have been primarily requesting wage will increase.
©2015 Bloomberg News
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