Gbenro Adesina/Ibadan
About 100 aggrieved contract staff of Whyte Cleon Limited, an insourcing subsidiary of First Bank Limited, who claimed to have been wrongfully disengaged from service protest their sack in Ibadan, of Oyo State on Monday.
The sacked staff who described their sack as sudden, unruly and callous act by their employer also protested to the Correspondents Chapel office of the Nigerian Union of journalist, Mokola, Ibadan.
The sacked staff who were drawn from all the branches of the first generation bank in Oyo state said that they were protesting on behalf of over 1,000 of their colleagues that have suffered a similar fate.
In the placards they carried and conspicuously displayed, were series of inscription to express their grievances. The inscriptions in their placards reads, “No to modern slavery by FirstBank”, “Pay us our nine years benefit”, “@First Bank Nigeria, if you must sack pay entitlement”, “FirstBank engages in modern slavery”. “Pay your support staffs their entitlements after nine years”, “Our mumu don do”. Firstbank, pay my nine years entitlement”, “FBN = in-sourcing = Whytcleon. stop slavery”, “FirstBank exploiting staff since 1894”, “Firstbank. the right way to lay off is to payoff”, “Nine years of corporate slavery”. First Bank give us our entitlement” and “First Bank, pay our nine years benefits”, amongst others.
Addressing a press conference, the aggrieved group said many of the disengaged workers had served the organisation for not less than nine years but that instead of rewarding them with full employment status, the organisation could only disengage them with a short message service without any benefit, which they also said it is unacceptable.
In an address, the spokesperson of the group, Mr. Aleem Waheed, insisted that they were not engaged by WhyteCleon Limited, but by Insourcing Limited, a subsidiary and Human Resourcing arm of FirstBank and that they worked and were being paid by First Bank Limited.
According to him, the sacked workers with varying years of service ranging from seven to nine years diligently and competently served the bank adding, “all through our years of service in the bank, many anomalies had been ongoing. For instance, they don’t pay us some bonuses and allowances which were being enjoyed by full fledged staff of the organisation despite the fact that some of us dubbed contract staff have better qualification and years of experience than some of the full fledge staffs”.
Waheed stated that many of them had served the company without complaints, despite being in the know of many anomalies, and that they were being denied some entitlements and benefits that they all worked.
Waheed who claimed that disengagement letters were not handed to any sacked staff as at the time they were told to hand over all bank belongings in their custody and stop reporting for work listed of the the entitlements the bank denied them to include: “Pay For Performance, PFP, Up Front, Relocation Allowance, Millage Claim (travel allowance for training)”
The copy of the text which was made available to reporters read, “Dear Colleague, this is to inform you that you are here recalled to Whyte Cleon Limited effective September 8, 2017. Kindly submit all Banks properties in your custody, including handover note, ID card, Token and other documents to your BM/HBS/Supervisor effective Monday 11th September 2017, you are no longer expected to report to your current location. For further directives or call the number of the officer overseeing your region as indicated below: North Jumai Adams (08091052850), South-South Olalekan Atoyebi (08187078518),West Onoriode Aramogbo (08023417968). Thank you”.
According to the spokesperson, most SMS delivered when many of the workers had already reported for duty but unable to log on unto the system.
The group appeals to the government, the Central Bank of Nigeria and relevant stakeholders to quickly come to their aid by impressing on the bank to pay them for the nine years they had served the organisation.
Fielding questions from reporters, the group noted that the so-called casual workers were the backbone and strength of any FBN branch in the country as their number in all the branches always outnumber the core staff, yet they were the least paid and least appreciated.
He added that, the salaries they were being paid was too meagre for anyone of them to have something to fall back on, but that, their hope of being converted to full staff someday soon, as promised by the employer accounted for the reason many of them had endured the agony and pain of remaining in the bank for that long.