PENSION, PROMOTION ISSUES AT NCDMB (NCDMB MANAGEMENT, WORKERS AT LOGGERHEAD)

PENSION, PROMOTION ISSUES AT NCDMB (NCDMB MANAGEMENT, WORKERS AT LOGGERHEAD)

The Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board (NCDMB) may face a strike action by its employees, if the NCDMB management refuses to address issues relating to staff pension remittance, promotion, and unionization.

The workers handed down of a fourteen (14) working day ultimatum, which will expire on Friday, May 8, 2015, to the Board’s Management due to the inability of the NCDMB management to respond to the issues raised above.

The Port Harcourt Zone of PENGASSAN issued this strike notice (dated April 24, 2015), stating that the Board’s management violated existing labour laws and practices concerning promotion, payment of non-regular allowances, allowing willing employees to join union and pension remittance.

The union has demanded that the management should constitute a promotion committee made up of all general managers from various directorates and divisions in the Board, adding that the demand became inevitable as a result of avoidable communication gaps that exist during promotion exercise and further advised the management not to encourage selective promotion as such may cause disaffection among the staff.

The workers called on the NCDMB management to cancel a promotion examination conducted for staff on level SS4 as obtainable in other government agencies and parastatals in the oil and gas sector of the economy, such as the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR), Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency (PPPRA), Petroleum Equalisation Fund Monitoring Board (PEFMB) and Petroleum Training Institute (PTI), among others.

The senior staff called the management to promote all those affected by the examination result, while urging that all promotion should be backdated based on the normal three years promotion basis as was used in previous promotion and in other government agencies and parastatals.

On pension remittance, the workers observed that in the last nine months, the management has stopped remitting pension deducted from staff salary into Retirement Savings Accounts (RSA) of individual staff Pension Fund Administrators (PFAs).

The workers therefore condemned this as a violation of the 2004 Pension Reform Act and demanded that the management should without delay commence remittance and payment of the arrears from June 2014 till date.

Source: http://worldstagegroup.com