In the early 1990s I worked for Amoco Oil Company at their headquarters in the Standard Oil Building on Randolph Street in Chicago. During the first gulf war we enhanced security for the 5,000 employees who worked there. We were issued special identification cards and each of us had to pass through a security station that included a metal detector to get to work. The company ran full page newspaper ads that opined about the war, their role in middle east security and the supply of oil in the United States. During the conflict, oil prices rose dramatically, causing trucking companies to implement a new pricing mechanism called “fuel surcharges” to preserve profitability during market driven oil price fluctuations. Higher oil prices impacted everyone. I had a front row seat to view how instability in the Middle East was related to United States consumer society.

Amoco (originally Standard Oil of Indiana) was one of the companies formed when John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust was broken up by federal regulators in 1911 for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. In the 1990s, Amoco had a world view that enabled them to operate anywhere oil and consumers of oil were located. It was a political exigency for them to comply with local laws and respect local cultures where they operated. This is not to say that Amoco always wore the white hats, but to describe their global footprint and corporate outlook. Amoco was the 9th largest United States corporation at the time and in many ways they operated like they were their own country.

While I gained a perspective of
multinational corporations at Amoco Oil Company, working there for a career was not for me. Considering the workplace, both in the corporate offices and at some of the refining sites, long term employees seemed trapped in a fate that resembled a form of indentured servitude. A key initiative of the company was dealing with addictions and social dysfunction. These things were endemic to a place where many employees came to the same work in the same place year after year, for decades. The trade-off for employees was a better than average pay and benefits plan. Many seek these types of office and manufacturing jobs, and there is a price we all pay in our health, to the environment and in our economic and social lives.

By 1998, the companies broken up in 1911 started to get back together and Amoco merged with British Petroleum, becoming BP Amoco and eventually BP, with the tag line “beyond petroleum.” Through its recent history, this led us to the explosion at BP's Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico. The history of John D. Rockefeller, Standard
Oil of Indiana and British Petroleum is worth reading and I encourage you to click on these links and do so.

~Paul
Deaton is a native Iowan living in rural Johnson County and weekend
editor of Blog for Iowa. He is also a member of Iowa Physicians for
Social Responsibility and Veterans for Peace. With the advent of spring
he is also planting and blogging about his garden which you can check
out here. E-mail Paul
Deaton