High gas prices no threat to CABS

A year ago gas prices were hovering just below $2 a gallon. Although those prices seemed high at the time, they are relatively low compared to the nearly $3 per gallon seen today. At the current price levels an 18-gallon tank can cost nearly $54 dollars to fill.
Now multiply that nearly $3 a gallon by 3,000. That is about how much it costs to run the Campus Area Bus Service buses weekly. 

As expensive as it sounds, Ohio State is confident it will be able to maintain its regular service routes even with gas prices on the rise. 

"We've anticipated fuel rise and have made allotments for it in our budget," said Sarah Blouch, director of Transportation and Parking. 

CABS, as well as other university vehicles, gets fuel from the on-site gas station on West Campus. This fuel station is available because of a contract between Transportation and Parking and State of Ohio resources. 

This contract not only ensures that OSU can run its CABS service at full-time without worry, but also regulates the rates at which the university purchases its fuel. Currently, OSU sells regular and diesel at $2.30 per gallon, and B-20, a bio-diesel fuel used for the buses, at $2.20 per gallon. 

"Most of what you pay for in gas is taxes, we don't have to pay that," Blouch said. 

Nearly 20 percent of the price of a gallon of gas is tax, which is used for highway repairs and construction.









According to the Federal Department of Energy Web site, one barrel of crude oil contains 42 gallons, but when refined it produces only 19.9 gallons of finished motor gasoline, as well as other petroleum products. 

Some students are relieved to know that CABS will still be in full effect, even as the price of gasoline continue to rise. 

"With the Core Circulator gone, I think it would have been a terrible inconvenience to the students to not have full service of the Campus Loops. For people who have classes on 9th and then classes on Woodruff immediately following, it's the only way they can get there on time," said Mary Stallings, a senior in political science. 

"Hopefully we're saving the students, staff and faculty a lot of gas by having them ride the campus bus," Blouch said.

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Special report: Australia's big dig for foreign workers

 Lucille Lievaux, a 25-year-old French geologist, commutes to work on a plane, a 1,300-km journey from Australia's Indian Ocean city of Perth to the mining town of Karratha, a smudge of suburbia on the continent's barren northwest coast. 


Slim, blonde and passionate about her job, she sits in Karratha's busy single-storey airport, waiting for a jet to take her home. She has swapped her hard-hat and orange-striped overalls for a short-sleeved cotton top, jeans and sneakers. Wearing her sunglasses like a hair-band, she looks out of place in a departure lounge crowded mostly with unshaven men. 



Only the dirt beneath her short fingernails and tanned, weathered hands would suggest she has something in common. 


"Australia is like an El Dorado," says Lievaux, who came a year ago on a holiday. She now nets $5,000 a month, working two weeks out of every three at the Whim Creek prospect, an old open-cut copper mine dug out of the red rocky plain. 


"It's so easy, so easy to find a job here as a geologist."

And it's so hard for Australia to find enough workers like Lievaux to sustain its mining boom. The tightening labor market is driving up wages, and combined with the resurgent Aussie dollar, is putting pressure on the entire manufacturing sector. 


Lievaux may earn about $60,000 a year after tax and be chauffeured to work in a jet, but she is not particularly well paid by the standards of Karratha, an Aboriginal word meaning "good country, and other remote boom towns. 



A mine supervisor can earn in excess of $200,000, more than the head of the Federal Reserve. A truck-driver's salary easily runs into six figures. A construction worker can make over $150,000, more than a doctor or lawyer. 


"You can get girls cleaning at the mine camps and they can easily earn $100,000 a year," says Tracy Reis, 42, a travel agent based in Karratha. 


The reason for this labor shortage, and the sky-high wages that come with it, is simple: Australia, with a population of 22 million, does not have the workforce to exploit its enormous natural bounty -- at least not at the pace required to satisfy Asia's hunger for resources. 


The mining and resources industry, including oil and gas, has roughly $400 billion in new projects on the drawing board in Australia and will need another roughly 70,000 workers over the next five years alone, according to government estimates. 


The construction industry is projected to need another 196,000 workers over the same period, many of them associated with new mining and energy projects. 


The boom is just beginning and, already, labor is short -- not just for skilled jobs like geologists but also for unskilled work, creating a situation where even building laborers, cleaners, cooks and drivers are earning stratospheric wages. 


But rather than flinging open the doors to foreign guest workers to fill these lower-level jobs, as countries such as Singapore and Dubai have done, Australia is taking measured and, some economists say, inadequate steps to import overseas labor.

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