Workers of the A&P Foods Ltd Dopemu branch, the makers of biscuits, confectioneries, vitamin C drinks, and health products in Nigeria on Thursday, 20th of December, 2018 staged a protest against the management of the company over poor remuneration accussing the company of suspending staff union without reason.
The workers according to information are unhappy over the company’s nonchalant attitude towards the welfare of the workers.
To drive their point home, the workers recently carried out a peaceful protest in front of the company gate in Dopemu to show their disaffection with their predicament.
Some of the placards they displayed carried inscriptions like: “Say No to Modern Slavery;” “No More Casualisation of Workers For Long periods of Years,” and so on.
According to one of the staff, Temitope Adedipupo who is one of the staff members of the A&P Foods Ltd, he said “In this company, we have eleven years casual working without good salary structure. They get short payment every month. If you call yourself eleven years casual and you have family at home and at the end of the day, they didn’t allow you to work for full month, all because of their negligent. At the end of the month, an eleven years casual will be going home with fifteen thousand Naira as a monthly salary. How would they feed the family? Even we the so call staff, our salary is nothing to write home about. It is only in A&P Foods that I see staff members getting thirty two thousand Naira per month.
“I know of other companies that, if you’re staff, they started receiving good salaries starting from fifty thousand naira and above. But here a new staff is receiving thirty two thousand Naira per month. As a new staff here, your basic salary is six thousand five hundred, when will the basic increase to ten thousand Naira? When we don’t get appraisal. If they want to appraise us, they will be appraising us with seven hundred and fifty naira and the highest is one thousand naira. Meanwhile, we have some special people that they are giving the appraisal to.” Temitope disclosed
He also said “They call us illiterate and at the end of the day, they will bring in new workers with Higher National Diploma certificate to head us. When they pasted memo for employment and they are asking for Higher National Diploma or National Diploma, many of us apply but none of us was invited for an interview because they have their people they wanted to bring in.”
“Now they have succeeded and they are paying them good salary leaving the chunks of the work for we that they tagged illiterate. Their new intake are the one producing the highest scrap in A&P Foods Ltd.
He however alleged a Labour union representative of tagging them illiterate saying “And that’s how they’ve been presenting us to all these white men and the labour national union because one of the Labour national union came here to address us and he said he believes that, most of us are illiterate, we have the video to confirm this allegation. We have a video where a Labour union representative is telling us that he believes all of us are illiterate. If the management have not been saying that in their presence, he wouldn’t have utter such statement.”
When he was asked, what they want, he said “We’re saying enough is enough. This ‘Casualisation’ of workers for long period of years must stop. We want only two things. Olubiyi Abiola, one of the human resources manager must go and we want our staff union to be reinstate because if they eventually succeed in dissolving our union, we’re not getting a dime from the company because no one will serve as our mouthpiece when the need arises. We know what they are up to. They want to dissolve the union because administratively if you give someone indefinite suspension, it could lead to permanent termination. And we don’t want that” Temitope concluded.
However, some of the affected members of the staff and casual workers also implore the government to come to their aides by mandating the company to comply with the standard basic salary structure designed for every Labour workers in the country.
