Teetering, as we are, into 2009, it might be a good idea to take stock of where we are as we deal with the continued fall-out from the global financial crisis. More specifically, WILL WE LOSE OUR JOBS???

Overall, the news is bleak. According to a report issued by the Economic Policy Institute Dec. 10, 2008, only 3.1 million jobs openings cropped up in the US in October 2008, down nearly 25% from the previous December. The rapid decline in job openings was accompanied by a sharp increase in unemployment, up to 10 million people in October, more than three times the number of openings. “The number of job seekers per opening has skyrocketed from 1.9 at the beginning of this recession [December 2007] to 3.3 less than a year later,” the report states. “The rapid increase in this ratio clearly indicates the weakness of the current labor market and the difficulty that workers are having finding jobs.”

Unemployment in the US increased by another 250,000 jobs in November 2008, the report states.

As I write this column, oil is selling at about US $45 per barrel, down $100 from its peak in July 2008. To those of us who remember oil tanking below $10/bbl in the late ’90s, this still sounds like a pretty sweet price. But plans that were made around $100 oil are probably being reconsidered even as we speak.

So what are companies doing? Anyone who has survived the oilpatch for any length of time knows that layoffs have, in the past, been the quick fix that seems to keep Wall Street happy and share prices stable. I’ve had my wagon hitched to a major oil company (Phillips Petroleum, now ConocoPhillps) since 1984, and we endured not only the lean, mean ’80s but also the twin takeover terrors T. Boone Pickens and Carl Icahn, neither of whom were successful but both of whom caused the company to undergo major cost-cutting initiatives just to keep the afloat.

Further downturns in the ’90s led to more layoffs, creating the current scare about the “Great Crew Change,” in which the handful of people who still have jobs will all retire and there will be nobody with any experience to take their places.

What a conundrum. With CEOs gnashing their teeth about this upcoming wave of retirements for the past few years, now they have to make some tough decisions. Do they want to make the same old mistakes again and cull the herd one more time, or do they want to keep the talent they have and find other ways to weather the storm?

Believe it or not, there is good news on the horizon. A recent report from the Dow Jones Newsletter titled “Set to avoid ’80s mistake, energy sector shuns layoffs” indicates that companies may have learned from the errors of the past. “Crude oil futures fell 64% between November 1985 and April 1986, resulting in an exodus of rig workers, petroleum engineers, and infrastructure experts,” the article states. “These layoffs ended up costing crude oil and natural gas companies later as the shallow labor pool pushed up salaries when commodities prices took off earlier this decade.

“Oil and gas executives say they won’t repeat this mistake and intend to continue paying employees enviably high salaries and expand their hiring in the US and around the world. This is happening even as many other industries are shedding workers in anticipation of a global recession.”

This is at least partly due to the fact that oil company managers are often lifetime employees, and many of them are themselves the survivors of layoff rounds in the past, the article states.

To assure myself that this isn’t just a pipe dream, I took a very informal poll of some of the major oil and geophysical contractor companies asking a simple question — are you still actively recruiting? All of them said, “yes.”

So I’m not in panic mode just yet. Companies still seem to be walking the walk when it comes to finding ways to stanch the hemorrhage that will occur once older workers start to retire in droves. And I think the plan is paying off. At this year’s ConocoPhillips Lower 48 Christmas party, I was, for the first time, one of the older people there. I envied the 20-something women in their tight-fitting cocktail dresses. But it was nice to see them there nonetheless.