Not sure what the pay is but I assume it is highly competative due to the competition. These are indoor, heated and modern fab shop welding jobs for the most part with health-dental-eye-life-disabilty insurance, 401K, paid vacations, paid holidays, etc. You could quit a job at 9:00AM and have another by lunch time. I'm serious. I heard anything less than $20/hr with full bennies for low skilled shop welder work is an insult. Pipe and ASME pressure welders get much more. Lots of automated welding also. CNC stuff. Huge demand for CDL drivers everywhere. Other trades like drywallers, roofers, carpenters, plumbers, electricians etc in high demand. Diesel Mechanics...they are SCREAMING for diesel mechanics and regular auto mechanics as well. Great training opportunities unavailable anywhere else for sure. If you have a pulse, show up for work, are not covered in jailhouse tattoos up to your neck, can pass a background check, have basic communication and computer skills, they will hire you in a second and provide thousands of dollars in paid training also. Check out the Steffes web site. This is a very large brand new facility and they are hiring now.
http://www.steffes.com/Many of these places provide cash bonuses for employee referals that result in a successful hire. A few hundred dollars or so followed by more if they stay around longer than 6 months.
Railroad expansion is huge up here also and railroad workers like carmen-welders are needed also. These are union jobs with Federal Railroad Workers Pensions instead of Social Security. There are no pipelines so they truck the oil from the wells to a miles long tanker train that is parked right in the center of Dickinson ND. I drove for two miles and never saw the end of this tanker train.
This oil boom is just picking up steam. They are burning off all the Natural Gas fro the oil wells as they have no way to store or transport the stuff. I heard they are wasting up to $3 Billion a year in Natural Gas and there are companies looking to cash in on that also.
The position I was applying for was a union position in a non-oil related field so I'm not sure what the fab shops pay. I'm just going by what I heard.
Again, the only downside is lack of housing. If they don't provide it or give you rental assistance, it's not worth it. Don't come up here for a job if you don't have a place to stay or you'll end up homeless.