March 2009, Balhaf, Yemen

The winter honeymoon weather is over. Springtime in Yemen has arrived early with hot dry winds carrying the desert dust fine as talcum powder. What a pleasure, as my S. African friends say.

But this spring is different from last year because we are seeing the beginning of the end of this project. The gas tie-in with the Marib pipeline is complete, and with it, a heightened awareness of things-that-could go-wrong. Sometime in the not-too-distant future we will move in to the SIMOPS phase, which means that Train 1 will be brought online and turned over to Total to operate. Simultaneously, construction will continue on Train 2, with all the welding, cutting, grinding and other sparky activities that are so often disdained in areas where new valves, flanges and threaded fittings are getting used to the idea of carrying explosive gas at high pressures. But this stuff is boring. There are other could-go-wrong scenaria with human interest flavor to type about.

Here’s an example of a situation which could have turned ugly, but didn’t, except for the principals involved.

One of the large Subcontractors, Gama, a Turkish firm, announced their demobilization schedule. Gama has a large number of Yemen (of course) and Indian laborers. The schedule was skewed towards demobing Yemenis during the first wave. The argument, which has a kernel of truth, is that the Yemen laborers are not as detailed-oriented as the HVE Indians. As we move towards SIMOPS, lots of the final work will be in the form of punch list items, which requires attention to detail, because you might be working on one task for two hours, then move to a different task. Each task requires different equipment and materials and, notably, moving to a different work location without wandering off, or just stopping. As a general rule, the Indians are better at doing that than the Yemenis. Not that any of the work is complicated: we’re talking shovels and wire brushes.

The Yemenis, predictably, played the Yemenization card, which is an agreement between Total and the Yemeni government for preferential hiring of Yemenis in lieu of HVE (highly valued ex-pats. used to be TWN - third world nationals, but the PC police forced the change). Gama refused to negotiate, arguing that the Indians were more expensive – higher pay, and transportation costs – why would they keep them instead of Yemenis if the qualifications gap didn’t require it?

So, after several days of unrest and demonstrations (unnervingly centered on the Yemgas main building) one morning 600 Yemenis refused to go to work. The management reaction was swift, and 250 Yemeni military came onsite and rounded up 60 of the identified ringleaders. Rather than busing them out, they made them walk 2 km through the camps, shouting and chanting the whole way.

In hindsight, it is pretty clear that the ringleaders were all tactics and no strategy. No teamsters these guys. One imagines the post mortem among the evictees:

“So what do you think went wrong; strikes are supposed to bring employers to their knees?”
“Uh, 40% unemployment in Yemen?”
“No specialized, hard-to-replace skills?”
“200 guys standing around outside begging for low skill jobs?”
“What about those lowlifes, taking our jobs, there ought to be a name for people like that.”