The National Labour Commission (NLC) says it will meet with the Telecom and IT Professional Union (TIP) over its strike action on Thursday, March 18, 2021.
The Commission insists the Telecom and IT Professionals Union should have returned to the Commission for enforcement of an earlier arbitration order it gave rather than embarking on industrial action.
The Executive Secretary of the NLC, Mr. Ofosu Asamoah explained that the commission has received correspondence from management on the Union’s strike and will meet both parties on Thursday to resolve matters.
He however chided the TIP for declaring the strike.
“If the Commission has given a directive, and it has not been followed by one party, it is only proper that the other [party] reports the defaulting party for the Commission to take steps including court action to get the party to comply rather than to declare a strike. The strike doesn’t come in when it comes to service providers, especially in a case where the Commission has arbitrated on it and all that was needed was enforcement. So it was for them to report to us and invoke our powers to enforce the directive,” he explained.
The Telecom and IT Professionals Union declared a strike which was intended to commence today, March 15, 2021, in protest of poor conditions of service.
The union has said salary negotiations with the management of the four subcontractors who have been engaged by Huawei Technologies Limited to maintain the technical operations of MTN, AirtelTigo, and Vodafone have not yielded fruitful results.
They have therefore resolved to boycott work until their concerns are addressed.
The General Secretary of the Union, Israel Edem Agbegbor, told Citi News the subcontractors’ management has refused to implement the pay structure after the National Labour Commission’s arbitration process.
“So clearly we have employers who do not have the workers at heart. Salary negotiations which were supposed to be done by the end of September were dragged to this January.”
“When the union proposed 20 percent just to help you cushion these workers… management comes to tell us they do not have any offer for the workers, so they are offering zero percent,” Mr. Agbegbor said.
