The Private Telecommunications and Communications Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (PTECSSAN) have embarked on a 7-day warning strike, threatening to cripple services nationwide.
The union, largely contract staff, began their industrial action on Monday as they demand, among other things, reinstatement of some of their sacked colleagues, recognition of the union, improved working conditions, and remittance of membership dues.
“The strike has become inevitable because of the prevalent precarious working conditions our members are enduring in the sector, the refusal of the employers to recognise and respect the constitutional right of these workers to freely associate with the union, and the unjust sack of three members of the union,” it stated in its seven-day strike notice.
The union’s Secretary-General, Okonu Abdullahi, said the association’s 800 workers play a significant role in managing critical infrastructure like base stations for infrastructure companies such as IHS, Huawei, etc.
“The implications of the strike will be massive because we have told all our members not to respond to any service outage from our employers. The fact remains that there are outages every day, and if our engineers do not respond to those outages, subscribers in those areas will be affected,” he said.
He said members of the union include field maintenance engineers, transmission engineers, customer service engineers, fibre engineers, and other critical staff working for telecom service companies.
The telecom union had in April embarked on a similar strike over a similar situation, which was resolved through a reconciliatory meeting convened by the Ministry of Labour between the union and the telecom servicing companies.
According to the PTECSSAN secretary, “The labour ministry had intervened in our previous industrial action, but unfortunately, the companies are still repeating the same issues, which have now escalated because we have more members participating in this strike.”
When asked if the Federal Government or the companies have engaged with the union on the current industrial action, he said, “We have given them ample opportunity to address our demands, but they have chosen to ignore us. If they continue to neglect our grievances, we will have no choice but to take more drastic measures.”
