For Timiebi Aligbali, a casual staff with the Kubwa Unit of the Power Holding Company Of Nigeria (PHCN, Abuja, February 11, 2010 was just another day on the job.

He had done the same job for 11 years since he was engaged as a casual worker for the PHCN after completing a Diploma course in electrical engineering.

But the day turned out to be his final on the job as he was electrocuted when he climbed an electric pole to effect some repairs.

Expectedly, his death was greeted with some protest by other casual workers of the Kubwa unit of the PHCN.

Some of the protesters, who spoke with journalists, said they were angry that the management of the PHCN did not comply with the rules which forbade casual workers from climbing poles.

The casual workers, by the rule guiding their engagement, are also forbidden from engaging in other life threatening activities of the power company.

But for Aligbali’s wife and little daughter, the loss of their bread winner was particularly devastating because casual staff are not entitled to anything from their employers.

“The situation is particularly bad because the casual worker is not entitled to even a funeral grant,” laments Sylvestre Aligbali, the late PHCN worker’s uncle.

Records from the PHCN shows that the company has thousands of casual labourers across the nation, especially in the main cities.

Incidentally, it is not only PHCN that is host to so many casual labourers.

Statistics from the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) show that a bulk of workers in the Telecommunication, Oil and Gas sectors are casual labourers.

Other sectors with thousands of casual labourers include mining, steel, banking and insurance.

A recent report by the Campaign for Democratic and Workers’ Rights in Nigeria, an NGO dealing with labour issues, said recently that 45 per cent of Nigeria’s labour force is made up of casual workers.

The report expressed the fear that the situation would only worsen as employers seek out ways to reduce cost of doing business.

Chief Olumide Adeyemi, a legal practitioner, who specialises in Labour law describes ‘casualisation’ as a working arrangement that is not permanent in nature.

“It does not fall within the traditional standard employment relationship,” he said.

According to him, workers in this arrangement do not have a permanent job status and do not get the same pay and benefits as their regular permanent counterparts doing the same job and working the same hours.

Adeyemi said that the continued engagement of casual labourers was at variance with provisions of section 17 (a) of the Constitution, which guarantees “equal pay for equal work”.

“The section frowns against discrimination on account of sex, or any other ground whatsoever and so the discrimination in pay between permanent and casual employees should not exist,” he said.

He lamented that many casual employees do not have letters of employment while many companies do not have records of their casual employees in order to evade the law.

Tracing the history of casualisation of workers in Nigeria, Mr Chinedu Alozie, a senior lecturer in the Department of Industrial Relations, University of Lagos, said that it became a feature of the Nigerian labour market in the late 1980s.

“It became prominent when the country adopted the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) in line with the neo-liberal policies prescribed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.”

According to Alozie, one of the effects of this policy was the retrenchment of workers in the public sector, which created large scale unemployment.

“The private sector, which was to be strengthened by government policies to absorb these workers, could not absorb all the retrenched workers from the public sector. “Because of that, many of the workers were employed as casual and contract workers with low remuneration, limited benefits and lack of right to organise,” he said.

To protect the contract workers, the International Labour Organisation(ILO) in 1998 declared in Philadelphia that its member must “respect, promote and safeguard the principles concerning the fundamental rights at work”.

The Declaration, although not binding in international law, suggests that member countries have an obligation to respect and promote the fundamental principles involved, whether or not they have ratified the relevant ILO Conventions.

Incidentally, Nigeria has ratified the ILO Convention and is thus obliged to uphold it.

Again, the African Charter, which has been enacted as an Act of Nigeria’s National Assembly, provides in Article 15 that, “every individual shall have the right to work under equitable and satisfactory conditions’’.

The Act also says that all Nigerians must receive “equal pay for equal work”.

Specifically, the Act states that there should not be any form of discrimination in employment between standard workers and their nonstandard counterparts.

In Nigeria, the campaign against casual labour was intensified by the Nigerian trade unions in 2000, when they embarked on picketing activities on companies believed to be guilty of the offence.

But picketing has not yielded the desired result, as the incidence of temporary staffing continues.

For the casual workers, the situation is only worsened by the fact that they are not part of any trade union as they are not fully employed.

Although there has not been much struggle against casual staffing, the NLC says it has not yet relented in its effort to fight against the use of casual staff.

NLC General Secretary, John Odah, while defending the lull in the union’s fight against temporary staffing, dismissed insinuations that the NLC has lost the fight against casualisation.

“On the contrary, the fight against casual or contract staffing by employers in the country is still on and we are planning to take it up as a big issue soon,” he said.

Odah, however, accused government of being indifferent to the plight of such category of workers.

“That indeed compounds the problem,” he said.

 He argued that it was the responsibility of the Ministry of Labour and Productivity to see to the welfare of Nigerian workers and ensure that they are treated fairly and justly.

He lamented that government agencies, which should aid labour activities in the country, have joined employers to violate labour laws.

“The Ministry has been empowered by the constitution to safeguard workers, but unfortunately, they have not been doing their job,” he said.

Adeyemi, the legal practitioner, agrees with Odah and blames government for not creating adequate policies that will regulate labour relations.

Adeyemi identified food, steel, beverage and engineering outfits as the worst culprits, saying that the unions have tried in vain to end the trend.

But government said recently that it was doing its best to check the trend by applying the right laws.

According to the immediate past Minister of Labour and Productivity Adetokunboh Kayode, the Federal Government has advocated an “effective law” as a means of eliminating the casualisation of staff.

“The moment a law is enacted, everything will be in place, and the idea of casualisation will be eliminated,” he said.

For Mr Dimeji Bankole, Speaker, House of Representatives, the trend is “a very unfriendly labour practice”.

“Casualisation undermines the productivity and efficiency of Nigeria workers,” he told members of the House recently.

He said it was in a bid to forestall such practice that the new labour bill was being carefully studied in the House.

But Mr Peter Akpatason, immediate past President, National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG), believes that government must go beyond pronouncements and do the right thing to check the trend.

He described casualisation as “one evil that has for long remained the bane of the oil industry”.

“NUPENG has made lots of efforts to tackle the problem of casualisation in the oil and gas sector by seeking to convert all contract workers to permanent employees.

“The advent of this global inhuman staffing strategy, which only takes congnisance of cost reductions for investors, has resulted in a gradual drift from decent work to the most precarious work relationship.

“It constitutes the single largest and most contentious challenge to unions worldwide and needs to be quickly addressed by government.”

Mohammed writes for NAN.

Zainab Mohammed