By Chinelo Obogo
The National Union of Air Transport Employees (NUATE) has said it will soon picket airlines that prevent their members of staff from joining labour unions of their choice.
NUATE expressed disappointment to the practice employed by certain Nigerian airlines that conditions employment on refraining from union membership, asserting that these actions constitute a contravention of established Nigerian labor laws.
At the ‘National Campaign for the Unionisation of Private Domestic Airlines in Nigeria’ held at the Murtala Muhammed Airport in Lagos on Monday, national president of NUATE, Ben Nnabue, said that they have secured the support of the International Transport Workers Federation (ITF), London, in their push to unionise private domestic airlines in the country.
He said at the last global labour unions conference held in Singapore, it was observed that a lot of organisations are not unionised, hence the mandate to ensure that slave labour is eliminated on the African continent.
“In Nigeria, we have come to terms with the reality that majority of our domestic airlines don’t want their workers to join unions while some have allowed their staff to unionise. Others at the point of entrance warned their staff against joining any trade union of their choice.
“We have been on this for the past five years. We have reported to the ministers of labour and that of aviation. All of them have been promising us that something will be done but you can’t be following up a project for five years, it means that they want to do anything.
“At the last meeting we had at the ITF, fortunately I am the chairman of the ITF branch in Nigeria, the organisation is in full support of our action. They also sent their regional secretary, Mr. Itsafianu to come and monitor the process and also Mr. Dayo was sent from London to come see what we are doing about it. That shows how serious the global body views the decisions of our airlines not to allow their workers to join the trade unions.
“This is the last olive branch we intend to extend to them. The next time we will have to use what the laws allow us to do, we will picket them, but we have to exhaust all the channels of dialogue first, then we are at liberty to use the last resort which is to picket those organisations,” Nnabue said.
Also speaking, NUATE General Secretary, Ocheme Aba, said that it will be in the good interest of airlines and organisations in the aviation sector to allow their workers to join the labour unions, affirming that no airline that allowed their staff to join trade unions have gone under.
“It is on record that apart from Nigeria Airways, no unionised airline has gone under. All the airlines that have gone under were not unionised. An airline worker that is unionised cannot cut corners. They work according to the rules because if you give them a query, they will answer the query and if the company will carry out any action, there is usually fair hearing so they are protected.
“But those airlines that folded up are the ones that didn’t have any organised structure, no organised maintenance structure, no workforce structure, no director of administration, everything is one person in one office and that is why many of these people do not want unions because they want to do things as they like and we must also understand that a worker who does not have a negotiated terms of employment is just a paid slave,” Aba said.