If we couldn't depend on big corporations to give us the fat dividends we expect, we'd keep our money in the bank. Without some of these big corporate profits, we might not feel so secure in our jobs, either. That is, if you work for a service station or auto dealership. Try telling that to your average trucker, who now needs to mortgage his farm to fill his gas tank. Those gas station jobs may not be all that secure, after all.
Many oil companies are under the gun from shareholders to cut costs to improve profits.
All that talk about creating jobs is a smoke screen. That last time we got service at a gas station was about 50 years ago. When gas was 19 cents a gallon and you still had your gas pumped, windshield cleaned and oil checked. Nowadays, all the help you find at gas stations are one or two cashiers barricaded in a bullet-proof cage. The bottleneck is not OPEC and oil production reductions so much as a refinery backlog.