Stavanger, Norway: Sparkling wine instead of champagne, companies cancelling their Christmas celebrations, unemployment soaring and real estate prices flagging: with crude prices plunging from record highs, Norway's oil capital Stavanger is hungover after the party.
"There you go, another rejection." Roger Schurmeyer holds up the umpteenth job rejection letter he has received on his smartphone.
At 36, this former audiovisual solutions manager for Statoil has been out of work for almost a year, a victim of the state-owned company's savings programme.
"I've been working since I was 16 and I've never been unemployed until now. It feels quite strange," he says, sitting in his apartment on the leafy outskirts of Stavanger.
"I've heard there are about 300 or 400 people applying for the same job. So it's a tough market," he sighs.
The oil-rich southwestern region of Norway posts an unemployment rate of 4.1 percent, which looks enviable enough.
But it represents an 81 percent increase from a year ago, and, in a brutal change of fate, is now the highest in the country. Even headhunting firms are letting people go.
All because the price of a barrel of oil has plummeted from more than $100 in early 2014 to around $45 dollars today, inciting oil companies to slash investments and jobs.
Stavanger, once a cozy fishermen's village, has become an opulent town of 130,000 residents after the 1969 discovery of Ekofisk, a giant offshore field still in operation that ushered Norway into an era of unprecedented prosperity.
A sign that the region has fallen on harder times, three oil services vessels now languish in the docks on the edge of town. And Scandinavian airline SAS has just halted its direct flights to Houston, Texas -- the United States' oil hub.
"I check the oil price almost every day," admits Christine Sagen Vestbo, the Conservative mayor of Stavanger since 2011.
When she began her first term, the town's biggest problem was attracting enough engineers to fill all the job openings. It was the place in Norway where Porsche had its highest market share.
AFP
