I was proud to work in oil and gas. But with layoffs and wage cuts, all I cared about was my crew

This First Person column is written by Dave Mackenzie who worked as a welder in Calgary. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ.

I was standing in bay 5 in a smoky, dark welding shop in a soulless industrial park in Calgary. What used to be a clean, orderly, well-staffed workspace was now a mess.

Engineer's drawings were scattered everywhere. Cut lists were missing, broken tools were piling up, and the previous shift had somehow managed to build part of a gas processing structure backwards.

"What are we doing here?" I thought.

That was last winter. I'd been doing this work for almost a decade and I'd never seen morale so low.

The welding crews I supervised are an integral yet invisible part of the oil and gas sector, Alberta's largest industry. Working nights and days on the outskirts of Calgary, we fabricate massive structures for distant oil and gas fields — some 35 metres long and weighing upwards of 100 tonnes.

It's a much-maligned industry. After years of austerity, government tax cuts and increasing energy prices  had finally given us hope. But unlike previous booms, this time there isn't much new investment. 

Without regular work, welding shops had slashed their workforces and reduced wages for those that remained. When large jobs did come in, shops would bring in welders much the same way as they brought in steel and welding electrodes.

Then let them go. But these were people, not consumables.

That's why I kept my goals modest. Keep my crew safe, keep the quality of work up and accomplish what we could in our allotted shift — in that order. Today, it was obvious we weren't going to meet our deadlines.

Suddenly, I heard someone yell, "Man down! Man down!" 

My heart skipped a beat. I was off, running in the direction of that voice. 

I rounded the corner into bay 6, past Hermingildo, who was manoeuvring an I-beam into place with the overhead crane.

I swerved to the right, scrambled over a loose pile of angle iron and cut to bay 7.