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More and more, multinational companies, as well as the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and its subsidiaries, are using non-direct and contract workers to perform key functions in Nigeria&rsquo;s oil and gas industries. That is the assessment of both ICEM affiliates in the country, the National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG) and the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (PENGASSAN). 
 
The proliferation of such employment &ndash; referred to as casualisation in Nigeria &ndash; in fact, 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 the world&rsquo;s largest energy concern, ExxonMobil, which has completely phased out NUPENG members in favour of contract staffing. 
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Casualisation in Nigeria is synonymous with cheap labour and maximisation of profits. The common fact is that when companies phase out full-time staff, they re-surface as short-term contract workers where rights to Freedom of Association are limited, their social entitlements are curtailed, and career paths become vague or non-existent. 
 
In early February, the two unions combined to wage a two-day strike against Mobil Producing&rsquo;s downstream operations across several states along the Niger Delta. The root cause of the strike was that several contractors serving Mobil Producing had sacked Nigerian nationals from full-time positions, replacing them disposable, casual workers. Those sackings were not just to junior staff, but also came among the ranks of highly skilled, professional, and experienced nationals in technical, engineering, administrative, and commercial positions. 
 
Despite several conventions between the unions and employers to address casualisation, Mobil Producing refused to address the issue. This led the ICEM to bring the matter to the attention of the US-based parent company. That letter can be found <a href="/wp-content/migration/icem/15.exxonmobil.ceo.16Feb.pdf">here</a>. 

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Pengassan and Nupeng leaders at ICEM Headquarters
At one subsidiary of NNPC, the Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas Company (NLNG), it is estimated that a full 60% of all workers are hired through labour brokers. They have no registered terms or conditions of work, are without social welfare benefits, and can be fired at will. It is equivalent to a modern form of slavery. 
 
NLNG and other companies operating in Nigeria&rsquo;s energy sector claim it is essential to their viability to outsource work not related to their core activities. But the question of what constitutes a company&rsquo;s core business remains open. Is it exploration and drilling, marketing and transportation, catering and cleaning, clerical and administrative? Companies operating in Nigeria&rsquo;s oil and gas patches make the argument that all are non-core. But in reality, all workers in these areas are oil and gas workers, and all deserve a minimum set of social benefits and job security measures, as set by national law and international labour standards. 
 
NUPENG&rsquo;s newly elected President Igwe Achese said there is ample evidence that &ldquo;multinational companies and their indigenous collaborators collude in reducing direct employees in efforts to de-unionise, create disaffection among workers, and to evade responsible employment practices. 
 
&ldquo;All workers, whether full-time workers or those employed by contractors performing tasks for primary employers, deserve set conditions of work, rights and privileges, and certainty in career paths in order that they know they have secure futures.&rdquo; 
 
The ICEM will continue to champion NUPENG and PENGASSAN in the unions&rsquo; initiatives to combat the menace that casualisation brings to quality work life in Nigeria.

Casualisation Eroding Decent Work Doctrine in Nigeria’s Oil, Gas Sectors

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ICEM&rsquo;s Colombian affiliate the National Oil Workers Union (USO) called for international solidarity in their conflict with British Petroleum (BP). Workers at the BP plant at Tauramena, part of the Cusiana oil field in Casanare, Eastern Colombia, have been striking since 22 January for improved wages. On 15 February the notorious ESMAD, Colombia's notorioius riot police, were sent in to attack the strikers&rsquo; picket line. Three USO members are still in hospital with injuries sustained from the police attack. 
 
View a union video of the attack <a href="http://www.usofrenteobrero.org/index.php?option=com_content&amp;view=article&amp;id=519:trabajadores-petroleros-de-tauramena-agredidos-por-el-emad-video&amp;catid=60:tauramena&amp;Itemid=100">here</a>.&nbsp; 
 
Last week BP attempted to bring in scabs to the central processing plant, but they were stopped by strikers who chained themselves to the entrance gates. This sparked local BP management to come to an agreement with the USO Bargaining Committee; however the outsourced contractors, SAR Energy, operating at Tauramena refused to recognize the agreement. Negotiations have been ongoing since then, through five negotiating committees: labour problems, social investment, goods and services, environment, and human rights, these temporary committees are working toward a deadline of 16 April, when agreement must be reached. 

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USO supporters outside BP Headquarters, London
USO&rsquo;s call for solidarity actions was answered last Friday, 5 March, when protestors demonstrated noisily opposite the BP Headquarters in London. The action was organised by the Colombia Solidarity Campaign. USO urges its supporters to continue to mobilise while the negotiations are ongoing. The ICEM supports the call on the Colombian government to insist that oil companies operating in Colombia respect the rights of workers to organise and to take strike action. USO is also calling for an official enquiry into the close links between paramilitary groups, and oil exploitation companies. 
 
Send protest messages to BP CEO, demand that the company conducts peaceful negotiations with the union, and condemns the ESMAD police repression. Send your message to Executive Director and Group Chief Executive Tony Hayward at email: <a href="mailto:tony.hayward@bp.com">tony.hayward@bp.com</a> 
 
Send messages of solidarity to the workers via USO Human Rights Commission email: <a href="mailto:usopaz@yahoo.com">usopaz@yahoo.com</a> 
 
Visit the Colombia Solidarity Campaign website <a href="http://www.colombiasolidarity.org.uk/content/view/486/">here</a>.&nbsp;

Oil Workers in Colombia Suffer Police Repression

Making available a significant number of key statistics, including the ICEM&rsquo;s own, as well as a wide range of &ldquo;best practice examples,&rdquo; the ICEM issued a new comprehensive presentation on &ldquo;CAL and the ICEM CAL campaign.&rdquo; Slide by slide, this education tool provides information on the ICEM&rsquo;s national and international CAL work, highlighting, among many other items, what unions around the world are doing in their daily struggles against precarious work. The presentation can be found <a href="/wp-content/migration/icem/2010CAL.ppt">here</a>. 
 
The statistics indicate that the phenomenon of short-term, contract, agency and other precarious work is still growing in almost every part of the world. On the other hand, there also is progress being made. In a lot of countries, for example, laws have been changed for the better. In other cases, unions managed to gain improvements for precarious workers through successful collective bargaining. Trade unions are also increasingly looking towards their own structures and strategies, aiming to better protect and defend often non-affiliated CAL workers.

New CAL Facts and Figures Overview

As part of its strategy to improve working and living conditions for metalworkers in Europe, the European Metalworkers&rsquo; Federation (EMF) has adopted a coordinated collective bargaining policy. 
 
The first coordinated, or common, demand was adopted in 2005 and called for the individual right to training, guaranteed by collective agreements. Last November, at the 6th EMF Collective Bargaining Conference, the 75 unions affiliated to the EMF agreed on a second common demand &quot;for more secure employment - against precarious work.&quot; 
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EMF Deputy General Secretary Bart Samyn
&ldquo;The last years have seen an incredible increase of precarious work and the number of insecure jobs has exploded in all European countries,&rdquo; said EMF Deputy General Secretary Bart Samyn. &ldquo;Everyone agrees that we can no longer deny this very real problem. Hence, the importance of this second common demand of the EMF and the willingness of all EMF affiliates to put the fight against precarious work central in their demands, in their upcoming collective bargaining rounds all over Europe.&rdquo; 
 
EMF affiliates are developing specific demands, relevant to their national situation, on temporary agency workers (TAW), workers employed on fixed term contracts, the bogus self-employed, and those on projects-based and zero-hour contracts, and are including these demands in their collective bargaining. A number of EMF affiliates have also initiated awareness-raising campaigns for more secure employment. 
 
The EMF Second Common Demand brochure is available <a href="http://www.emf-fem.org/Press/Publications/EMF-Second-Common-Demand">here</a>.

European Metalworkers’ Second Common Demand for more secure employment

The annual ICEM Asia-Pacific Regional Contract and Agency Labour (CAL) seminar took place in Singapore on 18-19 April. The seminar, hosted by the ICEM with the assistance of Germany&rsquo;s Friedrich-Ebert Foundation (FES), brought together 52 delegates, including representatives of the ICEM, the Building and Wood Workers&rsquo; International (BWI), International Metalworkers&rsquo; Federation (IMF), International Textile, Garment, and Leather Workers&rsquo; Federation (ITGLWF), Public Services International (PSI), and Union Network International (UNI). 
 
Union leaders and activists from 14 Asian countries, members of the Western European Team of experts from Denmark and Sweden, and representatives of the ICEM Secretariat and the FES attended the meeting, spoke about the impact of precarious employment in their countries, and shared strategies which they had developed to deal with CAL issues. 
 
ICEM General Secretary Manfred Warda had been scheduled to attend the seminar, but was unable to do so because of the disruption to European flights caused by volcanic ash from Iceland. 
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Participants discussed how CAL is being used to undermine the right to freedom of association, by companies who are letting go of permanent staff and hiring temporary workers in their place. Participants also discussed how the global economic crisis is being used by multinational companies as an excuse to reduce their permanent workforce, despite the fact that CEOs are receiving ever increasing pay packages. 
 
The participants proposed a number of next steps, including that unions should make CAL a priority issue and prioritise organising of CAL workers; that they should cooperate in campaigning at a national level for legislation which would make user enterprises responsible for agency workers;, and that collective bargaining should fully include CAL issues. 
 
Participants also proposed that a workshop be arranged to discuss how dialogue can best be arranged with labour-hire agencies to assure that labour rights and standards are upheld.

Global Union Federations Gather in Asia-Pacific Region to Develop CAL Tactics

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The 5th congress of the Slovak Chemical Workers was held in Svit, Eastern Slovakia, 25-26 November. It was followed by a merger congress with the energy workers which elected Juraj Blahak as President of the new union. Attempts to get the glass workers and construction workers also interested in the merger had failed before. 

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Juraj Blahak
Congress heard reports on economic development, very similar to those heard by the Hungarian Chemicals Workers, reported above (InBrief 146). Especially the automobile industry and with it the tyre industry is catching up, but there are still many uncertainties. Different speakers (also from the side of employers and employer associations who were invited) emphasized the relevance of social dialogue in addressing the effects of the global crisis. Employers criticized the government for prioritizing the attracting of investment from foreign companies, while neglecting to do enough for domestic companies.

5th Congress of Slovak Chemical Workers

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The joint publication of the Global Union Federations (GUFs) on climate change and other issues addressed at COP15, Copenhagen, is now available via the Council of Global Unions website <a href="http://www.global-unions.org/spip.php?article306">here</a>.&nbsp; Print copies are being distributed to the trade union delegation to the climate conference 

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The joint publication, entitled &ldquo;Getting the World to Work: Green Growth for Jobs and Social Justice,&rdquo; includes sectoral perspectives from each GUF, with a joint article published from ICEM General Secretary Manfred Warda and International Metalworkers&rsquo; Federation (IMF) General Secretary Jyrki Raina. The publication also includes explanation of union consensus positions on climate debate issues from the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC). 
 
The publication follows the success of a similar Council of Global Unions&rsquo; publication called &ldquo;Getting the World to WORK: Global Union Strategies for Recovery,&rdquo; in which global trade union federations, together with the ITUC and TUAC of the OECD, came together to present strategies in response to the global economic crisis.

GUFs’ Magazine on Climate Change Available Through Council of Global Unions

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The ICEM has expressed condolences to the families of victims of a horrible methane gas explosion in Turkey. The blast killed 19 miners and occurred late in the evening, 10 December, at a privately owned mine near Mustafakemalpasa, Bursa province. 
 
The explosion happened some 200 metres underground and caused a cave-in to several narrow mine shafts. Seven miners were rescued and hospitalized with gas poisoning. All of the dead miners&rsquo; bodies have now been recovered. 

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The Turkish Trade Union of Miners issued a statement following the blast, stating that mines in the country are plagued by lack of proper safety regulations and inadequate inspections. Turkey&rsquo;s Minister of Labour and Social Security, Omer Dincer, was at the site of the tragedy and said the mine had undergone numerous inspections. 
 
The ICEM has targeted Turkey as a country that must ratify ILO Convention 176, the Safety and Health in Mines Convention. Stated ICEM General Secretary Manfred Warda, &ldquo;The ICEM calls upon the Turkish government and employers to support the ICEM campaign for ratification of ILO Convention 176.

Explosion Kills 19 Inside Coal Mine in Western Turkey

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With a negotiated settlement between ICEM-affiliated Ghana Mine Workers&rsquo; Union (GMWU) and AngloGold Ashanti occurring early this month, negotiations in the gold mining sector of Ghana came to a successful conclusion. 
 
Earlier, the country&rsquo;s labour commission issued a mediated settlement between GMWU and 2,100 miners of Goldfields, while Ghana&rsquo;s third major gold producer, US-based Newmont Mining, reached satisfactory terms with the union in October. 
 
Three-year collective agreements for some 10,000 miners, retroactive to 1 July 2009, are now in place in Ghana, ending the threat of more strikes and labour discord that marked labour relations in the country&rsquo;s gold sector in third quarter 2009. (See InBrief No. 140 <a href="/en/78-ICEM-InBrief/3398-Ghana-Miners’-Escalate-Pay-Dispute-with-Gold-Producers">here</a>.) 
At AngloGold where 5,000 staff are employed at three mines, GMWU agreed to a 12% increase in 2009, and 10% salary adjustments in both 2010 and 2011. The union also won improvements in rent allowances pertaining to on-site housing, and won guarantees to review the union-management Provident Fund scheme and to align it more closely with the National Pension scheme. 

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The GMWU has worked to enhance efficiencies and lower operating costs at AngloGold&rsquo;s Obuasi and Iduapriem mines, and that work will continue under terms of the new agreement. The Johannesburg-based mining house, the world&rsquo;s third largest gold producer, said the cost of gold production at Obuasi has decreased by US$150 per once to US$671 per once in third quarter 2009, and that cost is expected to be go even lower in the next three years with cooperation from GMWU. 
 
GMWU General Secretary Prince William Ankrah called the new accord &ldquo;historic,&rdquo; stating it &ldquo;places the human equation at the centre of corporate thinking.&rdquo; 
 
Ankrah also said the issue of pay disparity between expatriate workers and Ghana miners will continue to be a point of discussion with AngloGold Ashanti. 
 
At Goldfields, a government arbitration panel determined that a 13.5% increase be granted to miners. The agreement with Newmont was reached with less discord, primarily because the company did not attempt to link the shrinking US dollar to salary adjustments. Pay talks for miners at Newmont will be again be addresses in the first half of 2010. 
 
With 2009 salary negotiations now complete with the major mining houses, GMWU will now turn attention to signing new accords with smaller companies and mining contractors.

2009 Gold Mining Talks Finally Conclude in Ghana

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A sequence of labour-management stand-offs at paper company Sappi&rsquo;s Nimjegen, Netherlands, mill on 2-3 December was what it took to bring labour peace, following three months of rancorous dispute. The defining stand-off that ended this dispute was a mill-wide, non-paid lockout by local managers, an anomaly to Holland&rsquo;s to social bargaining practices. 
 
That lockout, announced during the final hours of a legal 38-hour industrial action by four Dutch unions, including ICEM affiliates FNV Bondgenoten and CNV Bedrijvenbond at Nimjegen, set off high emotions inside the mill and forced fast intervention by Sappi&rsquo;s European management. 

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The result was a one-year rollover of the existing social agreement for 800 workers at the Nijmegen and Maastricht paper mills. The compromise, moreover, preserves &ldquo;seniorendaggen,&rdquo; or loyalty days away from the job for long-serving workers. This key issue was resolved with both labour and management agreeing that this social Dutch benefit would be retained until at least 1 July 2014. Accrual of senior days for new workers hired after 1 January 2010 will be eliminated. 
 
Following no response by Sappi to a workers&rsquo; proposal to end the dispute on 26 November, 24-hour industrial actions began at both Nijmegen and Maastricht. By 1 December, when Sappi still had failed to respond to a modest union proposal that could have ended the dispute, Nijmegen staff announced a 38-hour strike, while Maastricht workers would down tools for 24 hours starting early on 3 December. 

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The dispute&rsquo;s turning point then came late on Wednesday, 2 December, at the Nijmegen mill. With tempers short and rumours rife that the shutdown might last longer, mill managers escorted the few staff working off the job, and announced a non-paid lockout. 
 
Sappi also sent a letter to the unions requesting bargaining. Over the next 24 hours, through European corporate involvement, a compromise was hammered out. 
 
One fact that proved helpful for the Dutch unions is that on 15 October they staged a manifestation at Sappi European headquarters in Brussels, presenting senior executives with a petition signed by 800 angry workers. That manifestation was joined by written protests from global pulp and paper unions. 
 
Sappi did rearrange its contract terms in the days following the Brussels manifestation, but still wanted to be rid of having to grant senior days. The four unions decided to put Sappi&rsquo;s offer to joint vote, but Dutch paperworkers rejected it by 99%. 

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The industrial actions a fortnight ago, leading to the Nijmegen lockout, brought the dispute to a head. The compromise reached keeps the 2008 social agreement from Maastricht in place at both locations until 1 October 2010, and grants a one-year salary increase of 1.2%, backdated to 1 July 2009. 
 
The workers&rsquo; strikes at Nijmegen were the first such industrial stoppages in the history of the mill, while the walkouts in Maastricht were in first in over 30 years. 
 
&ldquo;We are grateful for the messages of support from trade unionists all over the world,&rdquo; said Ans van den Akker of FNV Bondgenoten. &ldquo;A special thanks goes to our Belgian colleagues who made sure that no struck work was brought to them at the Lanaken mill.&rdquo; 
 
The ICEM commends the courage and collective power displayed by workers of all four unions at Nijmegen and Maastricht. It was through their common resolve that they retained the rights most important to them, while earning the respect of Sappi management in doing so.

Dutch Lockout by Sappi Spurs One-Year Labour Accord

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