23 May, 2011
A study entitled “Oil and Casualisation of Labor in the Niger Delta” was released recently by the US Solidarity Center. It vividly depicts the social erosion occurring to the livelihoods of Nigerian oil workers due to casualisation, or contract or outsourced work.
The study can be found here.
It states that casualisation in Nigeria’s oil and gas sector is facilitated by the widespread poverty, joblessness, and plundering of natural resources along the Niger Delta. “As a result, Nigerian oil workers are vulnerable to a new kind of attack – quiet but more potent – an industry-wide shift away from regular, full-time work toward forms of cheaper temporary labour and short-term contracting,” reads a part of the executive summary of the study.
Bayo Olowoshile
The 36-page study says that under one-half of the country’s oil and gas workers are unionised, down from 60% in 2003. The rate of women in the union ranks is even less, 20%. It attributes the decline and low level of women in unions to increased use of casual workers in “an attempt to replace full-time unionised workers with lower-paid, less-protected workers and to relegate legal and managerial responsibilities to one or more third-party contractors.
“The casualisation model enables employers to ignore workplace standards and workers’ social needs and to create a strong barrier against workplace organising.”
Bayo Olowoshile, the General Secretary of ICEM salaried staff affiliate PENGASSAN, told the ICEM that major multinationals are to blame. “Companies have been allowed to adopt their human resource techniques and styles to deplete full-time staff and grant favour to dubious contractors.” He also blamed neo-liberal business models and government agencies willing to go along with those models for the anti-social trend.
Olowoshile said it is a common problem with his union and the blue-collar ICEM affiliate NUPENG, but that the union representing junior staff have had more opportunities to organise casual workers.
Olowoshile said the issue of casualisation will get more attention in the coming weeks in Nigeria with the release of a tri-partite position paper stemming from a PENGASSAN/NUPENG strike last August. That strike centered on infringement of workers’ rights for casuals. He said the unions and employers may not agree on all tenets contained in the paper, but that it must serve as a basis for dialogue to correct the economic and social imbalances inherent in the trend toward irregular employment.