Another 8,000 oil jobs are about to evaporate, a major oil-tool supplier said Thursday, deepening the industry's wounds even as U.S. crude has regained some ground from its steep price slump.

Weatherford International's 15 percent job cut brings the tally of layoffs by the world's four biggest oil field services companies to 25,000 in recent weeks - a bigger number in a shorter time than in oil downturns of the past. More are expected if oil remains cheap at $50 a barrel.

Weatherford CEO Bernard Duroc-Danner promised investors that the company, incorporated in Ireland with its main U.S. offices in Houston, will cut a dollar of costs for every dollar of revenue it loses to the downturn. More than half of the firm's planned layoffs, expected to be complete in the first half of the year, will be from operations in the United States.

"We're now confronted with an unusually severe market contraction," Duroc-Danner said on a conference call to discuss fourth-quarter financial results. The biggest problems will arise in North America, where oil companies are reducing tool orders and haggling for lower prices, he said.

Weatherford spokeswoman Kelley Hughes declined to provide further details on where layoffs might occur. The company employed about 3,800 in the Houston-area at the time of a Houston Chronicle survey last year.

After a $4.60-a-barrel plunge the day before, U.S. oil resumed an upward trend Thursday that has brought a 15 percent price bounce since it hit a six-year trough a week ago. U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate crude rose $2.03 to $50.48 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange Thursday. Brent, the international benchmark, increased $2.41 to $56.57 a barrel in European trading.

Both were above $100 as recently as late July.

No one knows if oil prices are finished falling, but the level where the price ends up will make a huge difference for the fortunes of Houston, the nation's oil capital.

The city would just barely skirt an economic recession if oil settled around $50 a barrel. At $10 lower, Houston would sink into recession, along with West Texas oil hubs Midland and Odessa, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics.

Oil-industry layoffs will mean reduced income and spending in Houston, affecting major economic drivers including retail, housing and manufacturing.

"Everyone is going to feel this in one form or another because of the loss of income created by all those oil industry jobs," Zandi said. But he noted Houston has diversified since the 1980s, when an oil bust mowed down thousands of oil-related jobs and businesses in Texas.

"If Houston had this price decline years ago it would have already been in full-blown recession," Zandi said. The economy's new diversity "has a real impact that's helping the city, but it's not immune from what's happening in the energy sector."

More Information Layoff tally Job cuts announced by the top four oil field services companies: 1. Schlumberger, 9,000 2. Halliburton, 1,000 3. Baker Hughes, 7,000 4. Weatherford International, 8,000

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More than 21,300 jobs were lost to plunging oil prices last month, Chicago outplacement firm Challenger, Grey & Christmas estimates. And Texas - an economic bright spot during the recovery from the global downturn in the previous decade - led the nation in January job cuts, according to the firm.

Two competing views – the bearish and the bullish – are vying for control over global oil markets.

Optimists see the free-falling number of active U.S. land drilling rigs – oil companies have idled 380 of the machines since late last year – as a sign the nation's crude output will slow, squeezing supplies and sending prices up.

But doubters see an anchor on prices in the winter-spring refinery maintenance season, which reduces those plants' oil consumption, and tepid demand worldwide, said Andy Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates in Houston.

The layoffs, he said, will help keep costs down for oil producers as the services companies like Weatherford that supply them cut their own costs so they can charge less - allowing both sectors to survive longer on cheap oil.

But cheaper services costs may not help producers for long, said Bill Herbert, an analyst at Simmons & Co. in Houston.

"It'll only be so long before demand for oil field service equipment rises," Herbert said. "These are cyclical fluctuation."

In the early 1980s - during the slow, steady first half of the decade's oil downturn before a steep drop began in 1986 - oil companies kept most of their employees for two or three years.

"The catchphrase was, 'Stay alive till '85,'" said Rusty Cloutier, CEO of Lafayette, Louisiana-based MidSouth Bank, which has 22 percent of its loans tied up in oil field services companies. "In '86, everybody got killed. They're reacting much faster now."

In the ongoing downturn, the banker said, he has heard hotel operators complain that oil-company contracts aren't being renewed, that oil workers are trimming travel and entertainment expenses and that their employers are cutting wages as much as 60 percent.

Oil field services firms are axing more employees at faster rates than they did in the oil collapse of late 2008 and 2009, which corresponded with the broader economic crisis then, said Rob Desai, an analyst at Edward Jones.

"They're trying to get ahead of it, to get into a better position for when the pendulum swings the other way," Desai said.

The services industry's preparations for a demand swing are evidenced in the way they are targeting back-office employees for layoffs more than operational workers, he said.

In the conference call, Weatherford executives said the ratio of support staff to operational workers was 59 percent at the start of 2014, but that the company aims to whittle that to less than 40 percent by the end of the year – and in the long-term, less than 30 percent.

Part of the reason oil field service companies have been so quick to cut jobs is that it is much easier to draw down operations in U.S. shale plays – which weren't active before 2007 – than in older, conventional regions, said Emily Yang, a management consultant at the North Highland Co. in Houston.

"The shale exploration industry has a lot more agility to change output compared to the traditional ways," Yang said.

As fast as the layoffs have occurred, Zandi, the Moody's economist, and other analysts said they believe the oil industry is reaching the apex of its job cuts over the next eight to 12 weeks. The reduction in drilling rigs may push oil prices higher over the next few months, analysts say.

That would be welcome news to U.S. oil workers and their employers. When employees fear losing their jobs, they tend also to lose morale and focus in their jobs, which affects companies' bottom lines, said Karla Saia, another management consultant at the North Highland Co. in Houston.

A workforce engaged in a company's mission, she said, correlates to fewer safety incidents, fewer quality defects and lower turnover.