Inside the new Petrobras — less ambitious, more focused on cutting costs — life for many remaining employees has slowed. Alarmingly so in some cases.
Take the engineer who was recently stripped of his title as a manager and forced to take a 40 percent pay cut. He’s spending much of his time nowadays reading newspapers in a semi-deserted office space. With two kids and a big mortgage, he’s hoping the Brazilian state-run oil giant will offer a new dismissal package.
Another manager frets about her future at the company. Her pay was cut too — by almost half — and all of the projects she was working on were scrapped. She passes the time browsing Facebook and other websites.
The two workers, who asked not to be named because they feared for their jobs, are among several interviewed who described similar situations. While the descriptions probably don’t apply to the majority of workers, the cutbacks are clearly spurring a sense of angst among those targeted. Two years ago, Petroleo Brasileiro SA had an aggressive five-year growth plan that carried a $237-billion price tag, and work for everyone. This month, it cut that figure by more than half, and Thursday said it would combine units and cut the number of managers, allowing them to be paid less. The goal: 1.8 billion reais ($440 million) a year in savings.
Brazil Energy Insight 
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