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11 February, 2008
This week, a deadline will expire for multinational oil and gas companies operating in Nigeria’s downstream sector. By Thursday, 14 February, Mobil Oil Nigeria Plc. and a handful of other companies must cease and desist on a range of anti-union activities, or face industrial action from senior staff.
PENGASSAN, ICEM’s white-collar oil and gas affiliate in Nigeria, issued the ultimatum at its National Executive Council (NEC) meeting late in January in Kaduna. It singled out Mobil Oil Nigeria, Oando, Chevron, and African Petroleum Plc. as targets. The union’s communiqué stated it would “vehemently oppose the attempt to extinguish unions in these companies.”
At Mobil Oil Nigeria, wholly owned by the world’s largest oil company, US-based ExxonMobil, the union-busting may be the most blatant. Despite bargaining with PENGASSAN through much of 2007 over retrenchments and reaching some agreements with the union, Mobil Oil Nigeria has reneged on those agreements. It has changed terms of lump-sum payments contained in a separation plan with PENGASSAN, and it is denying state-mandated pension benefits to less senior workers who are getting the sack.
And so far this year, in a data systems restructuring, which PENGASSAN and the company agreed would cost 42 jobs, ExxonMobil has unilaterally raised the count to 50 to include trade union activists.
PENGASSAN General Secretary Bayo Olowoshile said the company serves as the leader in the Niger Delta in undermining social standards, in violating the rule of law, and “with indiscriminate firings ostensibly to weaken or destroy the labour union.” He added the company has also failed to adhere to Nigeria’s Pension Reform Act, which mandates a level of benefits to staff made redundant who have less than ten years service and are under age 45.
“Mobil management is essentially holding the union ransom,” Olowoshile said, referring to a company strategy to drain the union financially. “They prefer matters go to the industrial court rather than find a mutually acceptable win-win resolution in the interest of industrial peace.”
In July 2007, Mobil Oil Nigeria violated best practice social code by contacting and coercing PENGASSAN members individually over separation terms. At the same time, the company was in social talks with PENGASSAN over redundancies. The voluntary termination letters that were offered to individual workers was a ploy to reduce the statutory amount of separation benefits.
PENGASSAN has also warned to Royal Dutch Shell, which currently has a plan to reduce its Nigerian workforce by combining business functions of three subsidiaries operating in the country. The union said industrial action could occur against Shell’s upstream companies if the company does not adequately complete talks.
In other action taken at PENGASSAN’s NEC meeting in January, the union condemned the non-existent security practices at Nigerian National Petroleum Corp.’s (NNPC) Okrika Jetty in Rivers State. On 19 December at the NNPC loading bay near its Port Harcourt refinery, dynamite used by people disguised as militants killed eight persons, including a policeman and a PENGASSAN member. The criminals were bunkering oil.
PENGASSAN President Peter Esele
PENGASSAN said “porous surveillance” and lack of any “security network and intelligence operations at the loading and discharging facility leaves much to be desired. We are seriously grieved that a criminally minded group could gain easy access without proper challenge,” said the union.
Meanwhile, PENGASSAN President Peter Esele has called on the Nigerian National Assembly to pass tougher laws against unfair labour practices committed by oil and gas companies. In an interview with a Nigerian newspaper, Esele said punitive measures must be imposed on companies engaged in contract staffing, casualisation, and violation of expatriate quotas.
“We are sounding a note of warning for companies to desist from it, or risk being sanctioned by a committee that would be empowered by appropriate laws to checkmate violators,” he told This Day publication. Esele last month was named by President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua to sit on the seven-member government board of the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, a panel mandated through a 2007 law.