Louisiana Offshore Accident Injury Lawyer
The list of different specialty oil field service personnel is far too long to provide a complete descriptive outline. Whether you work in the oil field as a temporary laborer, on a casing crew, or as a contract company man, your rights, if injured, depend upon various factors, including the structure or vessel you are working on, the work you do, the duration of your assignment, and the contractual relationship with the oil company-operator, the facility owner, or the drilling or other work contractor. These workers are usually classified as Jones Act seamen, maritime employees, or land-based workers. Additionally, a worker’s rights depend upon the precise mechanism of injury, whether that be the negligence of some other party, a faulty operational procedure, defective machinery or equipment, or a combination of those. From the moment of injury, owners and operators build their legal defense by blaming the service personnel or his employer for his own injury.
Here at the Law Offices of Matt & Allen, we fully recognize that work done by service personnel can be at a different location on a daily basis. The workplace and the working conditions are fixed by the owner or operator long before the service personnel arrive. Service personnel usually have no control over the workplace safety and must simply deal with the conditions of an unsafe workplace. It is no help that the job can be shut down by anyone on location. In reality, you will lose your job. The overused term of “stop-work authority” is useless when the worker has to put his job and his family at risk when he tries to exercise that authority. Additionally, the practices of pre-job safety meetings, Job Safety Analysis programs, and other procedures more often than not prove to be more about putting blame on the injured worker than about his actual safety and well being.
Although the service work performed is necessary for the larger project to be completed, the oil field has an historical culture to get the service work done as quickly as possible so the drilling or construction contractor can get on with the main project, whether that be drilling a well, working a well over, installing production equipment or any other major project needed for the owner to get on with his business, which, of course, is making money. In fact, most oil companies will not do work with a service company unless the service company signs a contract to provide insurance for the oil company and pay for anything, including injuries, that occurs at the worksite when the service workers are on location, even if what went wrong is caused by the oil company. That is why so many service companies treat their own injured employees so badly.
Mr. Matt’s engineering expertise and oil field experience, combined with Mr. Allen’s business expertise, give injured service workers the advantage of knowing and being able to fight all of these and many more issues which come with an oil field case. Furthermore, if you work for a service company, chances are we have handled many cases just like yours.
