‘Organisations now reluctant to pay workers gratuity’

Some financial institutions are still laying off staff, despite recent directive of the  Federal Government against it. What is your take on the development?  We keep on advising our members on the need to allow the union to be more active in decisions and to be properly briefed on the matter. Under no reason should […]

Some financial institutions are still laying off staff, despite recent directive of the  Federal Government against it. What is your take on the development? 

We keep on advising our members on the need to allow the union to be more active in decisions and to be properly briefed on the matter. Under no reason should the management lay off somebody anyhow.

The labour law and the collective agreement are  very clear about it. The labour law specifies that where you need to lay somebody off that the  union representing  its  members in that sector should be called for meeting and negotiation. The law didn’t say you can’t lay people off, but there  are ways of doing it.

We have been  appealing to  our members that they should not wait until they are laid off. The moment they heard the rumour  they  were about to be laid off they should write their management to that effect and let us  know in order to be properly briefed about who to discuss with.

We will keep on appealing to our members and management of their companies and employers that the recession and the economic meltdown we are going through is one that everyone needs all hands on deck. We also want to appeal to them that they should let us work together because our sector is a very sensitive sector and with the economic meltdown we can’t afford to have issue that will affect the general public trust on the sector that is already corroded by various acts and policies that are not acceptable to the people. We will appeal to the management to let us discuss and go through due process. 

What will you  work on during  your tenure? 

We will work more on trying to get the new collective agreement and a new labour law in place. We are going to sponsor some bills to make some adjustment on laws and edict on labour issues. Most of the labour laws we are using are those ones put in place prior to independence. There are modern ways of doing things now under the current age of globalisation. 

What informed your planned loss of job insurance for members? 

We realised that the way management of organisations are going these days, they always find a way of not paying our members at the end of their service. What belongs to workers which is the gratuity, majority of organisation are no longer paying it. So, we realised that when our members are asked to go nothing is always attached. Because of that we  realised that majority of our members would start thinking of tomorrow and delving into some untoward things. In order to prevent that, in order to have a succour somewhere, that is what informed the  proposal on loss of job insurance for members. 

How soon are you going to implement this? 

We are discussing with insurance companies now. The insurance companies are asking us to define what job loss is. Is it when the person retires or when the person loss his reason and forcefulness now is being interpreted as retrenchment and redundancy. We are also saying that in as much as those people retired, don’t have gratuity they are going to fall back on. What we are doing now is a general loss of job and we now put a section if it is due to retirement. So these are the proposals that we have presented to the insurance companies and they are working on it. 

There are concerns over undue pressure by banks on female bankers to mobilise deposit. What will ASSBIFI do to stop the  practice?

We made noise against the practice earlier, people didn’t understand and now it is boomeranging back. The banks set the target before then we rise through performance appraisal that is not  only target bias  Your appraisal then was based on  punctuality, number of time loss, education and contribution to the organisation. But suddenly when we started selling our national asset to various people that have no reasons to owners of organisations, the cowboys came on board and  changed the system of promotion which is now based on deposit volume.

But the banks are not enjoying it because people move the deposit from one bank to another to negotiate position. The way a bank in Nigeria declares profit is wonderful. We have written severally to the Central Bank that these billions after tax should be ploughed back. Before now in Nigeria, there was a condition  that a percentage of your profit should go to education fund, Industrial Training Fund  etc. Are these people declaring billions after doing that. Because of the corruption, no one was answering the question of the  union.

That is why I said it is now  boomeranging because majority of them based their expenditure  and loan expenditure.  What we are doing presently now is that we are asking our members to negotiate their target. When you are given a target you should be able to determine what you can do if certain things  are put in place. 

Do you think the banks will be willing to give them room for negotiation? 

The industrial labour  practice say before you are given a target there should be discussion and negotiation. You are supposed to have been told your target and it is your responsibility to measure what you can do. Because we have a pre-emptive  notion that  this is what  they want you to do there is no way you would negotiate without arriving  at what they actually want from  you. Organisations are really discussing target now and because they have made up their minds  the discussion is  just to fulfill all righteousness.