AVIATION

Aviation labour threatens to picket airlines resisting staff unionism

The aviation labour body, the National Union of Air Transport Employees (NUATE), revealed on Monday that it will soon pick up offices of airlines operating in the country that have refused to allow their staff to join trade unions of their choice.

NUATE said it is against labour law for some airlines to make employment conditional upon not joining a trade union, insisting that those who threaten workers with sacks for attempting to join unions are doing great damage to Nigerian laws.

Speaking at the ‘National Campaign for the Unionisation of Private Domestic Airlines in Nigeria’ at the General Aviation Terminal (GAT) of the Murtala Muhammed Airport in Lagos on Monday, National President of NUATE, Ben Konye Nnabue, told the workers that the union has received the backing of the International Transport Workers Federation (ITF) based in London in carrying out their actions.

He said at the last global labour union conference held in Singapore that 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.

According to the NUATE leadership, “In Nigeria, we have come to terms with the reality that the 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 aviation. All of them have been promising us that something will be done, but you can’t be following up on a project for 5 years, which means that they don’t want to do anything.”

According to the NUATE National President, “At the last meeting we had at the ITF, fortunately, I am the Chairman of the ITF branch in Nigeria, and the ITF is in full support of our action today. They also sent their regional secretary, Comrade Itsafianu, to come and monitor the process, and Comrade Dayo was sent from London to come see what we are doing about it. That shows how seriously the global body views the decisions of our airlines not to allow their workers to join the trade unions.”

He warned that “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.”

Also speaking, NUATE General Secretary, Comrade Ocheme Aba, affirmed that it will be in the good interest of airlines and organisations in the aviation sector to allow their workers to join labour unions, affirming that no airline that allowed their staff to join trade unions has gone under.

Aba told journalists that “it is on record that in Nigeria, apart from Nigeria Airways, which was deliberately murdered by the Obasanjo regime, there is no unionised airline that has gone under. All the airlines that have gone under in the country were not unionised.

“An airline worker that is unionised and has the backing of the union doesn’t cut corners; they don’t take orders from the owners to 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 a 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 negotiated terms of employment is just a paid slave.”

Members of the union carried placards bearing inscriptions such as ‘To belong to a trade union is a right; no negotiation’, ‘the worker needs trade union protection, workers rights are fundamental human rights’, a worker without negotiated terms of employment is but a slave’, and ‘every company must recognise the union. It’s the law.’

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