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5 October, 2005
ICEM’s Global Network of ExxonMobil Workers’ Solidarity is spotlighting recent deaths and physical abuses to protesters among 4,000 contract workers who have been denied overtime pay by Chad-Cameroon Constructors (TCC), a pipeline-building consortium led by Esso-Tchad, Chevron, and Petronas of Malaysia.
On 18 September, national gendarmerie of Chad violently broke up a peaceful sit-in, leaving three dead, three with serious injuries and 30 arrested. Workers have been protesting in the capital of N’djamena and in the southern oil regions of Chad.
The network’s attention on the Chad-Cameroon pipeline, opened in 2003 and now carrying 200,000 barrels-per-day, comes just months after Amnesty International issued a comprehensive report on how commercial contracts between Chad’s government and private-sector interests have destroyed human rights for both workers and civilians.
Contract workers are owed some US$12 million in overtime wages collectively for completing the US$3.7 billion pipeline ahead of schedule. Visit the website of the ExxonMobil workers’ network at www.ExxonMobil-solidarity.org.