"People, people who need people, arethe luckiest people in the world."Written in 1964 forthe Broadway musical Funny Girl and recorded by everyone from Barbra Streisand to Perry Como, these comforting words certainly don't apply to our industry in the fall of 2011.Ignoring volatile capital markets, commodity price swings, the U.S. economy and European debt, the oil side of our busi-ness is on reasonably solid footing. There's money to spend and resources to develop. The rate-determining step on growth, profits and prosperity is, once again, manpower.Everybody needs help. Anecdotally, entry-level jobs like service rig floorhands are experiencing up to 300 per cent job turnover this year. This means that in the next 12 months a well-servicing contractor must hire, orient and train (hopefully) three people to fill a single position. One frac company chief executive officer told me he offered a car sales manager in British Columbia a small fortune to come work in Alberta. He apparently passed because he didn't believe the frac business could be that lucrative.
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