By Joyce Remi-Babayeju
Unionized workers of the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission, NUPRC), in Abuja, have threatened to pull out their members from terminals across the country, if the management of NUPRC fails to address issues affecting their welfare in the next 24 hours.
The NUPRC workers, who staged a peaceful protest at the commission’s headquarters in Abuja, accused the management of non-remittance of pension deductions, poor working environment, insufficient working tools, as well as non-payment of outstanding claims for staff medicals.
Furthermore, the workers who are members of the PENGASSAN, accused the management of outstanding payments of 2023 Upfront allowances, unpaid staff on-call allowance, nonpayment of outsourced personnel, among other welfare issues.
Branch Chairman of the worker’s union, Comrade Okechukwu Anya, during the protest, condemned the non-remittance of pension deductions, noting that such action was an outright contravention of the Pension Reform Act (2014) which stipulates that monthly pension contributions should be remitted not later than 7 days.
The branch chairman accused the NUPRC Management of outright disregard in resolving the lingering issues, and lamented that all attempts to draw the management’s attention to the worker’s plights fell on deaf.
The protesters displayed placards with messages such as “We cannot work with our monies and not get a refund”; “You have deducted our pensions and refused to remit to the PFA”; Pay support staff 7 months salaries”; and Stop selling our future”, among others.
The members said, “We have been engaging them since January. We have written a series of letters, held physical meetings both officially and unofficially, and we’ve been met with paucity of funds. For every time, we throw up these issues we are told there is no fund, but we know what is happening in the system.”
“We know how they are awarding contracts and inflating these contracts. We know how money is being expended on unnecessary legal cases and spending huge sums of money on issues that are not supposed to be prioritized over staff welfare, and that is why we are registering our concerns.”
The Union insist that workers will be pulled out from the terminals if nothing is done to address the issues raised.
“We pull our staff out of the terminal with immediate effect. We have our staff waiting at the terminal waiting for the next line of action. We are putting management on notice, if they don’t quickly comply with our demands and our welfare, we will pull out our staff with immediate effect. Furthermore, we are to give management 24 hours to respond to these issues, or we pull out our staff.”
Anya, stated that the protest is to register their displeasure and to draw attention to their plight after all other channels have failed.
“We have engaged our management for so long on topical issues that affect the staff and all our complaints have all fallen on deaf ears and so today we have embarked on a peaceful protest to register our grievances. Anya said.
