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24 July, 2006
Oil fields workers in Chad again hit Esso-Tchad, lead company in a West African energy consortium, with a three-day strike last week. The workers, organized behind Chad’s national labour centre, UST, are seeking salary parity with oil workers in neighbouring Cameroon, connected to them by a 200,000-barrel-per-day pipeline.
The Chad-Cameroon Pipeline, fully operational now and reaping rich rewards for ExxonMobil, Petronas of Malaysia, and Chevron of the US, has been wrapped in a contentious funding dispute between the World Bank and the government of Chad, which only recently was tentatively resolved. The oil companies have used the high-profile stalemate over development monies to take holiday on many of their own social commitments.
Case in point is the difficulty oil workers in the Doha fields of southern Chad have in getting management at Esso-Tchad to respond to good-faith efforts to resolve salary differences and other work terms. An important matter in Doha that employers have ignored is a career development programme for oil workers, a plan that was promised when production began in 2003 but has not been delivered.
The 420 oil workers, behind the UST, said that if Esso-Tchad is not forthcoming in meeting their demands, they will launch a 10-day strike, which could come as early as this week. Workers struck initially from 4-6 July, and last week’s strike ran from 18-20 July.
The dispute between the World Bank and Chad was over a legislative change made to the country’s Petroleum Revenue Management Law last year. In effect, it changed the bank’s financial terms. The World Bank responded by halting all loans and development monies. On 14 July, the two parties reached an agreement that lending would resume once the government makes amendments to the law, including a requirement that 70% of oil revenues be used for anti-poverty measures.
The Chad-Cameroon Pipeline has been plagued by labour and human rights problems dating back to its construction between 2000 and 2003. To cite one social consequence, credible research done in 2004 reveals that the prevalence rate of those infected with HIV/AIDS was 19.8% in the bordering populations of the 1,063 kilometre pipeline, compared to a 5.5% average on the national level.