The National Union of Banks, Insurance, and Financial Institutions Employees (NUBIFE) staged a protest on Tuesday at the head office of Polaris Bank in Lagos over an alleged violation of workers’ rights and disregard for labour laws.
This development comes despite an order by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) barring deposit money banks from the mass sack of their workers.
The leaders and members of NUBIFE, while chanting solidarity songs, expressed their grievances to the management of the bank for laying off over 40 of its workers nationwide without paying them their accrued entitlements and allowances.
As early as 6 a.m., some members of the union had arrived at the venue of the protest with placards bearing some inscriptions like “Banking is not slavery, stop dehumanizing workers”: “Mass retrenchment cannot grow the bank and “Polaris Bank management should stop the mass sack of workers”.
Other inscriptions read “Respect our collective bargaining and the rights of workers”: “Outsourcing must wear a human face” and “Workers deserve better treatment”, among others, placed on the bank’s gate, which was under lock and key.
According to the letter of sack, written without any name of authorized signatory, addressed to Gift Onyeike, on May 31, 2023, the bank said it had withdrawn its services, as an internal security guard of the bank, effective June 1, 2023.
“You are hereby advised to hand over all Polaris Bank Limited and vendor properties, e.g., 1D card, lapel pin, token, and call cards, among others, to your care, effective May 31, 2023,” the letter stated while thanking Onyeike for the good working relationship he built over the period of his service with the bank.
Reacting, Onyike explained that he had put in 20 years in the service of the bank and was sacked on June 1, 2023, without any disengagement allowance, disclosing that he has not been paid his one-month salary in lieu of notice, which is N68,000.
Olusomu Eyikogbe, another affected worker, said he had worked for over eight years, collected his own sack letter on June 1, 2023, and is yet to receive his one-month salary in lieu of the notice.
Olusanmi Eiyitogbe, one of the affected workers, while expressing his disappointment,t said that the management gave no reason whatsoever for sacking them. He cried out that he could not even withdraw any money from the one-month salary in lieu of what the bank claimed to have paid.
NUBIFE, who described the process of the sack as an unfair labour practice, said that the financial institution did not follow due process, even after it consulted the bank’s management.
Muhammed Sheikh, general secretary of NUBIFIE, revealed that the union got reliable information prior to the sacking and that it wrote several times to the management of the bank to desist from it or be mindful of due process if they were planning to sack, but they shunned the warning.
Sheikh lamented that the unjust layoffs are a gross violation of workers’ rights to a collectively bargained exit package, which is also against labour laws.
The new management came on board barely six months ago, and instead of settling down to look at how to move the bank forward, they started sacking workers”.
You cannot have a worker dedicate the better part of his life, having worked over 15 years for the progress of your company, and then you wake up one morning and decide to terminate their employment, giving them only one month’s basic salary. That is completely wrong.
He stressed that the union will take up its responsibility to protect its member employees against any employer, company, or organization which thinks that it can break the law guiding workers or violate due process as it pertains to labour.
NUBIFE’s general secretary said that as a labour union, its members’ rights as workers deserve to be protected at all costs and that the union would continue to picket the bank together with the national body of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) until the issue is rectified.
“The NLC is aware of what is going on, members will be joining us if there is no headway. Our civil society coalition partners are also aware, they are waiting in the wings to join us.”
In a letter signed by Olarenwaju Oyekunle, the bank’s talent and culture officer, Segun Tawoju, and general counsel, presented to the leadership of the union, the management of Polaris Bank said it was ready to resolve the issues.
However, NUBIFIE has said the meeting it had with Polaris Bank management over the sacking of its members ended inconclusively. Sheikh told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Wednesday in Lagos that the meeting ended with nothing tangible to hold on to.
We just finished the meeting, but unfortunately, the meeting could not conclude because of the fact that demands we put across to them, the management said it may not be able to carry out the demands. The demand that went across was for us to have a level playing field for negotiation.
He said the bank declined their proposal to withdraw those sack letters and recall those workers, so that the union can now go ahead and discuss on behalf of the workers, and instead asked the union to go ahead and discuss what the sacked workers are entitled to.
“However, we told them that our principal gave us the mandate, that firstly, in order to commence discussion, they have to rectify the wrong that they committed.’
“So, it is on the grounds that we left; so, there was nothing tangible that came out of the meeting,” Sheikh said.
The labour leader said the union would hold a congress to discuss and would arrive at what the next line of action would be. According to him, the picketing held on June 6, was suspended temporarily because the management invited the union and gave a letter for a meeting.
Note that this is coming after an exclusive report that there is pressure on President Bola Tinubu to review and reverse the ‘illegal’ sale of Polaris Bank, which withheld salaries of over 100 of its branch managers for two months for having non-performing loan ratio above 5%
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