To those who believe that the potential for job growth in Richmond lies with legacy industries like Chevron, read the article below. The establishment candidates continue to berate Mayor McLaughlin for looking at green jobs and small businesses to staunch Richmond’s high unemployment rate, but they are all wrong. Chevron is not growing jobs; it is shedding them by the dozens.

We are getting no new ideas for job growth in Richmond from mayoral candidates Bates and Ziesenhenne and City Council candidates Viramontes, Lopez, Finlay and Harris, who still look to Chevron to break the City out of double digit unemployment.

Chevron Begins Planned Job Cuts at Richmond, California, Sites

By Samantha Zee - Sep 23, 2010 6:54 PM PT Fri Sep 24 01:54:36 GMT 2010
Chevron Corp. alerted employees at its Richmond refinery facility last month as many as 95 jobs will be eliminated at the site by the end of the year.
Most jobs will be cut in the company’s technology center that is adjacent to operations at its 245,000 barrel-a-day refinery at Richmond. Employees were notified Aug. 24 in compliance with state labor regulations, said Sean Comey, a Chevron spokesman. About 2,900 people are employed at the Richmond site.
“This is a challenging time for our employees,” he said. “We have a lot of people who are losing their jobs and it’s not a reflection of their skills or ability but a result of challenging economic forces.”
Earlier this year, Chevron said it would cut jobs from its refining, marketing and retail operations worldwide.
“Globally, in the downstream operations, workforce reductions were expected to be about 3,900 employees,” Comey said. Now, “this is being scaled back.”
At Chevron’s headquarters in San Ramon, California, and at a company site in nearby Concord, “the number of anticipated layoffs is lower than we originally estimated,” he said. “The layoffs are also occurring over a longer time frame.”
In San Ramon, about 150 workers were expected to lose their jobs by the end of July with a plan for a total reduction of 620 by March 2011, Comey said.
“What’s actually happened is that as of the end of August we laid off 50 people and are now projecting cutting 500 by December 2011,” he said. Jobs being eliminated “run the gamut from executives on right down through our downstream operations,” Comey said.
Concord Site
At Concord, about six positions were to be eliminated by the end of July, with a total of 305 planned by the end of March 2011. As of the end of August, the company laid off one person and anticipate the total layoffs will be 150, he said.
“The primary reason that fewer jobs will be cut was that we’ve been successful in redeploying employees to open positions in the company,” Comey said. “As the process was taking longer than expected, we gained flexibility to transition people into new assignments as they became available.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Samantha Zee in San Francisco at szee@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Dan Stets at dstets@bloomberg.ne