Kuwaiti oil workers have ended a strike after three days of direct action that crippled the country’s oil and gas production.

Strike organiser, the Oil and Petrochemical Industries Workers Confederation, said the strike was “overwhelmingly successful” with the workers showing their “ability to affect the production process”, according to a statement carried by the official Kuwait News Agency (Kuna).

The union said it entrusted Emir Sabah Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah in the “protection of rights of the employees of the oil sector”.

Thousands of workers were striking against alleged public sector pay cuts. It is unclear whether any deal has been made between the union and the state-owned Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (KPC).

Kuwaiti crude production plunged to 1.2 million b/d on 17 April during the first day of the strike, from normal production volumes of about 2.8 million b/d. Output recovered to 1.5 million b/d by 19 April.

Kuwait National Petroleum Company (KNPC) cut refining output to 520,000 b/d from 930,000 b/d before the strike as part of a contingency plan.

A statement from Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) on 17 April said the country was producing 620 million cubic feet a day (cf/d) of natural gas. In recent years, Kuwait has produced an average of about 1.6 billion cf/d.

It is unclear how long Kuwait’s oil companies will take to restore crude, refining and gas output to normal levels. For the last three days, KPC has been running its facilities using non-Kuwaiti workers, contractors and by recalling retirees.

The drop in Kuwaiti oil production was large enough to prop up the global crude prices after oil exporters failed to negotiate a production freeze in Doha on 17 April.

Analysts said the volume of crude leaving the market from Kuwait – one of the world’s largest oil exporters – was bigger than the current global oversupply.