Life is not any worse than a gory episode of a horror movie for Nigerians of all ages and academic qualifications forced to take on factory jobs to stave off the ravaging effects of unemployment
By Janet Olorunfemi
Lade Ogunbiyi, a 2009 graduate of Accounting from Moshood Abiola Polytechnic, MAPOLY, Ogun State, was one of the few lucky Nigerians to get a job with a Micro-finance bank immediately after graduation. But her joy was short-lived as the bank closed shop within a few weeks of her resumption, sending her back to the labour market. Although Ogunbiyi got a teaching job in a private school, the N15,000 monthly salary she was paid proved to be inadequate for the mother of one. Frustrated, she opted for a factory job with Solpia Nigeria Limited, a Chinese company that produces hair attachment and weave-on.
Like Ogunbiyi, Bimpe Ajanaku (not real name) was also forced to seek employment at Solpia Nigeria Limited as a casual. Following her inability to raise capital to set up a hairdressing salon after completing her training as a hair stylist, a staff of the company assisted her to get a job at the company’s factory.
Whereas Ajanaku relied on her contact to get a job as a casual worker at Solpia, Ogunbiyi and several others, who do not know anybody at the company, literally went through the eye of the needle to get the job. For three weeks, Ogunbiyi joined a long queue of applicants in front of the company daily. From the entrance right to the inner recess of the factory, it is tales of woes by scores of young Nigerians seeking employment at Solpia Nigeria Limited. The factory located on Iju Road, Agege, is always overwhelmed by Nigerians of all ages with academic qualifications ranging from O’ level to masters degree. Our reporter who spent one month at Solpia as a casual worker explained that the job seekers have a torrid time submitting their application letters and writing their names and phone numbers in an exercise book provided at the gate. As the applicants scramble to fulfil the requirements, security men and some officials of the company manhandle them and sometimes pour water on them to disperse the crowd and even threaten to tear-gas them.
Funmi Oni, one of the applicants who had toiled for two weeks to submit her application, was not so lucky. She was overlooked by the company’s supervisors who picked applicants from the queue at the entrance of the company, mainly female applicants to whom they had affinity, in the process earning jeers from the male applicants. The selected applicants are interviewed by a panel of about three to four people and the successful ones undergo a series of medical tests, including pregnancy, in a designated hospital. These tests cost N1,000 and the cost is borne by the applicants. Pregnant women are immediately disqualified while successful ones are required to open a Diamond Bank account through which their salaries would be paid.
Once employed as casual workers, they are placed on a salary of between N20,000 and N25,000 monthly depending on the department they are posted to. These departments include Brushade, Machine, Scaling, Finision and Piping. Those on night duty are paid an allowance of N6,000 monthly while working on weekends fetches extra N400. This amount may also reduce depending on regularity at work and penalties of various types.
Upon resumption, the riot act is read out by the supervisors who remind the casual workers of the consequences of absenting themselves from work, not meeting the daily target, insubordination to supervisors, and the use of mobile phone. For instance, using a mobile phone while on duty may earn a worker sack, while absenteeism leads to outright dismissal. Similarly, salaries are deducted for days workers are absent from work, even when it is for health reasons, with or without official permission. A lady, who simply identified herself as Modupe, narrated her ordeal to the magazine. According to her, she joined Solpia last January, but by March she took ill owing to the rigours of the job and was away from her duty post for five days. To her surprise, she was not allowed back into the factory even after presenting a medical certificate confirming her ill health. Eventually Modupe had to reluctantly re-apply to the same factory where she earns N25,000 per month.
At Solpia, the magazine found out that an agreement is signed with casual workers, stipulating that they would be converted to full staff after two years. However, with barely three months to the period, the management begins to find faults and issues query to the workers, eventually sacking them. Interestingly, once sacked, they re-apply for the same job the next day and are immediately employed. Besides, the supervisors, mostly Nigerians, were observed to be slave drivers, shouting and threatening to throw workers out if they did not do their bidding. “From the very beginning, we were made to realise that we are not permanent workers, but temporary; it was even written in the forms they gave to us (which) we got when we were given the jobs,” said our source.
A first-hand experience of life inside Solpia factory revealed that in every shift, about 2,000 workers are arranged into teams of 100 workers, each working under a Nigerian supervisor or team leader. The supervisor is a permanent staff, keeps daily attendance and acts as the eyes and ears of the Chinese owners of the company. Once inside the factory, workers are locked in until the close of business, observing their break in the canteen provided inside the factory at their own expense. With inadequate ventilation, the factory is said to be extremely hot and stuffy most of the time. The noise from the different machines makes life inside the factory a nightmare, posing health hazards to the workers.
At Solpia, the morning shift runs from 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. and break time is between 12–1 p.m. in the first shift, while the second shift commences from 7:30 pm to 6 a.m. with break time observed between 1 a.m. to 2 a.m. Workers entering the premises are thoroughly frisked, and are not allowed to enter the factory with any item. Any worker who fails to meet daily and monthly targets has his or her salary deducted and handed a warning letter. A warning letter scores the worker three points, and when it gets to 27 points, the contract is terminated. Indeed, working as a casual is not different from working in a slave camp, considering the treatment such workers get.
For female workers at Solpia, life is even more difficult. Although they are screened for pregnancy before employment, they are allowed to continue working if they get pregnant until they deliver their babies and are subsequently sacked. However, such affected women may re-apply, but their chances of getting employed afterwards are very slim. Life at Solpia is not very palatable for ladies who are daily harassed, even sexually. Indeed, sexual advances begin right at the entrance to the company, where men saddled with the responsibility of collating names of prospective applicants sexually harass them. Inside the factory, rejection of a sexual proposal by a supervisor could lead to outright termination of appointment.
Efforts by the magazine to get the management of Solpia to comment on its findings for two weeks were abortive, even after a formal letter was written to the company as requested. Sumbo Olagunju, an administrative staff of the company, claimed that the management was too busy with other pressing issues to attend to our reporter. “The management can’t grant an interview for now because the administrative manager whose responsibility it is to arrange the interview is busy for now. We will get back to you as soon as possible,” Olagunju fobbed the reporter off.
Life for casual workers is not any easier at OK Foods Nigeria Limited, a biscuit-producing factory located at Toyota Bus Stop, along Oshodi-Apapa Expressway. According to one of their casual workers, recruitment takes place once in a while as the need arises. Vacancies are advertised through the staff of the company as they arise. Successful applicants are then given forms to fill and return with passport photograph and a guarantor; identification cards and gate pass are thereafter processed and the worker resumes. They are paid N750 daily.
Shina Dada, a 27-year-old casual worker of six years, told the magazine that as a casual worker with former SONA Breweries, he was paid N45 per hour, translating to N315 for seven hours in the morning and afternoon shifts and N450 for 10 hours of night shift. Lateness from break means forfeiting an hour’s pay and lateness above 30 minutes means forfeiting the wage for that day. Virtually all the factories visited by the magazine have a similar mode of operation. Workers are engaged for between 10–12 hours daily, resuming as early as 7 a.m. and closing about 6 pm to 7 p.m.
But the growing trend of casualisation is not limited to the manufacturing sector. The trend, originally restricted to factory workers and those in construction firms, has crept into corporate organisations like banks, pharmaceutical companies and oil companies. For instance, Omolara Agboola, a teacher in Lagos State, was recently stunned when a young banker in her church approached her for employment in the teaching service. The young female banker narrated to Agboola how she had been working in a high-flying new generation bank as a casual staff for almost five years. Similarly, Paul Adewunmi, a masters degree holder, told the magazine that he had to quit his job as a bank teller with a leading second generation bank after three years earning N30,000 monthly. Across most Nigerian banks currently, majority of their workers are either casuals or contract staff.
Sunday Salako, first deputy president, Trade Union Congress of Nigeria, TUC, and national president, Association of Senior Staff of Banks, Insurance and Financial Institutions, ASSBIFI, sees the trend of casualisation in the financial sector as a misnomer which the union does not encourage. He is sad that banks, which hitherto began the trend of employing graduates, have now turned round to be apostles of casualisation. For example, he explained that in a branch of a bank with about 20 workers, only about two are permanent staff while others are casual workers, and that the two permanent staff would earn about 1,000 per cent more than the casual workers put together even though the casual workers do the bulk of the job. And for this, he explained, the banks are paying heavily for it indirectly because the financial sector thrives on public confidence and the moment that confidence is eroded, there is a problem.
“Look at the number of infractions and leakages in banks and see whether in those days when we joined the banks in the early 1980s and 2000s there was such. Not that there were no infractions and leakages then but they were so minimal because there were rules for character specimen and checks. But these days, with this kind of cowboy banking that we have, such checks have been eroded,” Salako rued, adding that a casual worker in a financial setting whose annual salary is about N600,000 would easily fall for a fraudster that dangles a N5 million tip for him to offer information about an account. Salako warns that casualisation could work in any other sector, like construction and manufacturing, but remains a big risk in the banking sector.
Despite the unprecedented growth of the Nigerian telecoms sector and attendant global reckoning of the industry, casualisation remains one of its dark spots. Dressed in the gab of outsourcing, the process by which companies and organisations contract all or some aspects of their services to third parties, virtually all the telecoms companies are involved in casualisation of workers most of who are not allowed to unionise, silently screaming blue murder. Not much was known about how Nigerian workers in the employ of the outsourcing firms were treated until about 3,000 workers in the Call Centre Service of Airtel Nigeria were sacked in 2011 by Airtel and its Indian partners, Spanco Channel BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) and Tech Mahindra. The incident opened a Pandora’s box on the quality of existing labour relations in the Nigerian telecoms industry, particularly considering the fact that the management of Airtel Nigeria originally disowned the disengaged workers, claiming that they were ‘agency employees’ with expired contracts. It, however, took the collective rage of Nigerians to force down the hands of Airtel and its Indian partners, as the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, and the National Union of Post and Telecommunications Employees, NUPTE, including the Nigerian customer service staff in the Lagos and Abuja call centres of the telecoms firm shut down its Abuja switch and closed 15 showrooms across the country. The sack as well as the plan to cut wages by 60 per cent, which would have seen workers’ wages reduced from N75,000 to N30,000 monthly, did not go down well with the workers.
The magazine’s investigations, however, show that casualisation in the telecoms sector is not peculiar to Airtel, as workers in other telecoms companies such as MTN and Etisalat are also going through experiences similar to those of their counterparts in Airtel. The fact that they are not unionised makes it difficult for labour to intervene. At MTN, for instance, workers are not unionised; none of their staff has ever approached NUPTE for membership, which is perhaps why many of the outsourcing firms employ several backhand means, turning Nigeria into labour camps. Several reports abound of how job recruitment firms hire qualified Nigerians on behalf of telecoms companies and outsource them to agencies working for these telecoms firms under manipulative contracts that neither guarantee the prospective employee job security nor the promised lucrative pay package. Besides, the employees are made to work under very harsh conditions, including longer hours without commensurate pay.
Determined to protect its industry, oil workers, under the aegis of Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria, PENGASSAN, recently spoke out against this practice which it reasons is aimed at short-circuiting workers’ career in the sector. The union contends that rules of engagement have given way to operational models, which strongly support casualisation, outsourcing, contract staffing and agency labour, in place of permanent employment. Babatunde Ogun and Bayo Olowosile, president and general secretary of PENGASSAN respectively, disclosed that employers now adopt other subtle, even more effective ways of stifling workers’ rights and agitations, regretting that employment is now being determined by business operational models with strong preference for casual and contract employments. According to PENGASSAN and Nigerian Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas, NUPENG, for every full-time oil worker, there are four casual workers. This trend has meant that many companies have completely done away with full-time junior staff or blue-collar workers in their employ. One example is Mobil Producing Nigeria, a subsidiary of ExxonMobil, which has completely phased out NUPENG members in favour of contract staffing.
Ismael Bello, acting deputy general secretary, Textile Workers Union, TWU, and the immediate past secretary of the NLC, Lagos state chapter, explained that the Labour Act, to some reasonable extent, permits employers to engage people on a temporary basis for jobs that are clearly very temporary in nature. “The law permits an employer that is engaged in manufacturing, for instance, and who has ordered some raw materials, to employ on casual basis for such jobs like offloading. However, a work that is done for one month, two months, three months, four months, is that of a temporary nature? That’s where the problem lies, because people are attempting to circumvent the law,” Bello contends. He, however, regrets that as long as a nation does not attain full employment, there will be issues of casualisation, agreeing that it has become a burden largely because of the unprecedented high level of unemployment in the country. Bello also blamed the government, who, in the quest for foreign investments in the country, welcomes all kinds of charlatans into the economy.
The trade unions may be agitating for the stoppage of this trend, but are the workers ready for it? Jerry Amah, TUC spokesperson, contends that although many workers are simply slaving and wasting away due to the casual nature of their jobs, most of them are scared of walking away from the slave labour conditions in which they find themselves, owing to the high unemployment rate and economic uncertainty in the country. Of more concern to the trade unions is that most multinational companies operating in the country bring in expatriates to take full-time employment with all the benefits that accrue to the job while Nigerians are placed on contract, which is renewed without benefits.
This contravenes Section 7 (1) of the Labour Act, Cap 198, Laws of the Federation of Nigeria, 1990. The Act provides that: “Not later than three months after the beginning of a worker’s period of employment with an employer, the employer shall give to the worker a written statement specifying the terms and conditions of employment, which include the nature of the employment and if the contract is for a fixed term, the date when the contract expires.” Also Section 17 (2) (b) of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria requires that “the sanctity of the human person shall be recognised and human dignity shall be maintained and enhanced.” Therefore, the International Labour Organisation, ILO, has come up with ILO Conventions which are labelled core labour standards based on human rights, especially the respect for the dignity of labour. These Conventions address workers’ rights internationally in the following areas: the right to organise and bargain collectively; the right to be free from slavery or bonded labour; the elimination of worst form of child labour; the right to be free from discrimination; and the right not to be unfairly dismissed.
Much as the NLC has tried to stem the anti-labour practice through picketing and other measures as allowed by the law, the federal government has not shown concern about the development. Even with a promise to ensure workers in the country are given their due, the federal government can only promise to reduce the scourge of casualisation rather than putting a stop to it completely. This scenario is better captured by statistics from the National Bureau of Statistics, NBS, which indicate that yearly about 1.8 million young Nigerians enter into the country’s labour market. And for this, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, minister of finance and coordinating minister of the economy, said she has been having sleepless nights.
Emeka Wogu, minister of labour and productivity, while charging the labour movement to make inputs to the federal government’s campaign to eradicate casualisation and other forms of exploitation of workers by some foreign and local employers of labour, reiterated that President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration has demonstrated its interest in workers’ welfare through the constitution of a number of committees on workers’ issues. He said that his ministry could boast of having a very virile department that is involved in inspection of workplace, factory inspection and general inspection to ensure that Nigerian workers work in healthy and environmentally conducive environment. He however agreed that the Act empowering the ministry to do this, called Factory Act, is old and the current regime is now trying to review it to meet the contemporary workplace demands.
But for now, the Nigeria worker continues to wallow in slavery.
Addition Reports by Muyiwa Lucas, Abiola Odutola, Bunmi Oludiran,
Clement Ogunbiyi and Kayode Ajayi
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