From pay-for-job recruitment scams to indecent employment and discrimination through outsourcing, unemployed and under employed Nigerian graduates are being daily oppressed and exploitedby employers of labour, IFE ADEDAPO writes
Sydney Akpotive’s had high expectations of a smooth career progression and job satisfaction in the banking industry when he got a job as a marketer with a second generation bank in December 2008. After concluding the mandatory 10-week training, the University of Port Harcourt graduate was filled with so much excitement and drive, not necessarily because it was his first employment, but because it was his first high-paying job after school.
Akpotive had been offered other jobs in the past, which could not be compared with that in the banking sector in terms of the prestige and respect he would attract from his friends and family members. With excitement, he began his career and strove daily to meet his marketing targets. At first, he was able to bring in deposits based, sold many products and services, and introduced new clients to the bank. However, his excitement did not last, because he found it difficult to meet the subsequent targets, which kept increasing.
He narrates, “As we started, the excitement began to dwindle and I was losing steam because I was not meeting my targets. But it was more than that. The challenges of the job were not what I envisaged; we were moving in circles. Everything that I had to do involved finding money and meeting higher targets to get more money.
“Six months into it, I was really fed up, I didn’t want to continue and I wanted to quit. I didn’t derive any value from the job and I didn’t add value to anyone. I wasn’t developing mentally and all I was thinking about was how to look for customers who would deposit money with the bank. Most times, we were not even selling the bank’s products, we were just looking for money. I did that for 11 months, by December of the next year, I was already fed-up. I put in my resignation letter and I voluntarily quit.”
Unfair labour practices
Akpotive recalls that one of the core values his then employer emphasised was integrity, a value that was in contrast to the reality in the bank. According to him, what really led to his resignation was the unfair treatment he got when a client could not repay a loan. Three months before the financial year ending, he was called by his branch manager who connected him with two clients; the first was the manager’s brother and the other, his friend. He appreciated the assistance his manager was rendering to help him to meet his target and he followed up on the clients as directed.
Eventually, the two men were able to move their accounts to the bank with Akpotive serving as the account officer, and they were granted credit facilities, which would be repaid within a month. He explains, “We gave one N1m and the other N2m. Using that tactic, we were able to persuade them to leave their bank and join ours. They were supposed to pay back in one month. I persuaded them to pay up but they refused. The one who got N1m had an outstanding of N400,000.”
By the end of the financial year in June, the operations officer told him that his clients had outstanding payments. He warned Akpotive to be proactive and persistent about the recovery of the debts, otherwise he might be queried and punished.“Usually we get loan approvals from the head office but the two credit facilities were approved by the branch manager and the regional manager due to the relationship they had with the clients,” he explains.
A few days before the fiscal year ended, his immediate boss told him to quickly make withdrawals from his account because the bank was going to freeze it. Dazed by the revelation, he rushed to withdraw an amount he could easily carry around. However, before the end of the day, the outstanding loan amount was deducted from his account.
He narrates, “I quickly withdrew some money that I could carry around, only for me to hear that they had frozen N200,000 from the account. By the time I went out and came back that day, the regional manager had given instructions to the operations people to debit my account for the customers’ outstanding loans.
“The managers used my money to pay back loans that customers collected with their approval. I didn’t give out the loan; I didn’t have the authority to give out loans. If they don’t approve, the customers won’t get it. When I got that alert on my phone, I was very angry and I was shouting.
“My colleague tried to calm me down but I knew that as I was going back straight to the regional branch managers’ office to register my disapproval of the withdrawal. I was determined to face the consequences of my action. But my colleagues persuaded me not to. That was the point when I decided not to continue with the job.”
This and many more stories of victimisation of employees and unfair practices are prevalent in the workplace today. While some are sacked and replaced by new recruits, others have decided to stay on the job and endure it. Moreover, there is no succour for the affected workers because their ill-treatment is not covered by Nigerian labour laws.
Basically, the issues of unfair labour practices highlighted in the law and that are vigorously defended by labour unions are related to wages, payment of retrenchment benefits, pension and outsourcing.
Unregulated practices such as the one Akpotive experience, which are not taken care of by the law, continue to determine the fate of Nigerian workers.
Workers and defective equipment
In a case of prejudiced working conditions, Anthony Onwukanjo (real name withheld for fear of victimisation) was called for an interview by a leading telecommunications company in Lagos. Three years of graduation, he could not boast of a steady means of income although he had been engaged in one or two businesses in the past but due to lack of infrastructure and unfriendly policies, the ventures did not thrive. According to him, some of the offers he received were from people and organisations who were out to exploit the unemployment situation in the country to their advantage, as he was offered a meagre N30,000 monthly.
While waiting for the job interview, Onwukanjo was confident that his experiences, skills and abilities would stand him out from the other applicants. But when one of the human resources team members came to address all the applicants waiting to be interviewed, Onwukanjo recalled her saying, ‘We don’t need your head; we only need your voice’.Not understanding what the statement meant at that time, he was eventually called in to be interviewed. The interviewers where impressed with the quality of his voice and the fluency of his English. As a result, they spent more time with him, asking him questions.
Onwukanjo remembered one of them asking, ‘Don’t you think you will be better off running your own business than doing a demeaning job?’ During the one-month training, one of the trainers kept saying, ‘Don’t make the mistake of getting stuck here. Whenever you see any job opening, apply for it’.
He says with a tinge of regret, “All these statements coming from people who have worked in the organisation for over 10 years only made sense after working in the call centre for the first three months. It just showed how people within view the organisation.
“Your performance on the job is measured by the number of calls you are able to pick in a single day, not the number of issues you are able to resolve for customers. The minimum number of calls you have to pick in a day is 155 and you are expected to spend a maximum of 90 seconds on each call regardless of whether the customer complaint was resolved or not. You are not expected to rudely dismiss a caller or you will be marked down by the quality assurance department.”
According to Onwukanjo, the conditions would have been easy to meet but most of the available systems were defective and unresponsive, as only one out of the six machines was in a good working condition. As a result, this was slowing down the pace of work, elongating the time spent on each call and contributing to the overall poor performance of call centre agents, he says.
He explains that the company recruits regularly, adding that every three months,workers are sacked because many are bound to perform poorly due to some of the unattainable benchmarks used to assess them. “If you are rated low and your review is poor, you may get zero calls and your job is at risk. At the end of three months, they may decide to sack people with the lowest scores,” he reveals.
From the subscribers’ perspective, customer care representatives are to resolve complaints related to the network, but Onwukanjo says the telecommunications company’s focus is to ensure that calls are picked.
“We hardly have first call resolution and a call centre agent may be kicked out for resolving customers’ issues. This is because some issues can take up to 10 minutes or more to resolve. Those who take advantage of the unemployment situation in the country to exploit job seekers lack creativity and show a huge deficit in character. They are greedy; they make money at the expense of others,” he adds with disappointment.
The International Labour Organisation’s provisions only address the prevention of accidents at the workplace as a result of faulty equipment but not what causes poor performance. However, in other countries like Zimbabwe, the Labour Act explicitly defines this scenario of unfair practice and dismissal.
Section 12(b) subsection 3(a) of the Zimbabwean Labour Act (Chapter 28:01) states, “An employee is deemed to have been unfairly dismissed if the employee terminated the contract of employment with or without notice because the employer deliberately made continued employment intolerable for the employee.”
The pay-for-work syndrome
Cashing in on the high unemployment rate and the desperation of Nigerian graduates, fake recruiters have come up with various techniques to swindle desperate job seekers. Reports from victims show that some, under the guise of recruiting fresh graduates, send interview invitations with no company name to people who have not applied for a job, stage-manage the process and compel applicants to drop between N8,000 and N12,000 as an initial investment fund for multilevel marketing.
The PUNCH investigated a scam recruitment advertised online and in one of the prominent newspapers in the country, in which our correspondent posed as an applicant and sent a modified curriculum vitae to the email address provided. Three days later, a text message was sent to her; it read, “You are invited for a job interview by 10am this Sat 5/12/2015 at Jobopolitan Limited, 44/46 Adegbola Street, Ikeja, Lagos. Bring you CV, certificate, photo and N200. For directions, Call 07067964392.”
On getting to the address, it was discovered that the compound houses four one-storey buildings. Our correspondent was directed to the fourth building where Jobopolitan operates from. The flat is located on the topmost floor and two banners were hung on the front door, one advertising a travel agency called Travelopolitan.com, which offers ticketing, flight reservation, travel insurance and visa assistance services, among others. The other banner stated that photocopy and printing could be done there, and that seminars and trainings were being conducted in the office.
A man of about 5.6 feet, who obviously was in charge of the recruitment agency, requested for the N200 for an aptitude test. Although there were no other applicants there, he kept saying a lot of people had come and gone. Two days after, another message was sent to her mobile telephone stating that our correspondent should come to the same address with a sum of N2,500 to collect the job placement letter.
A search online reveals that Jobopolitanis a foreign employment exchange website with the domain name: www.jobopolitan.com. It offers jobs to applicants in some cities in the United States. Further investigations show that the Jobopolitan recruitment agency located in Lagos is registered as an employer on the foreign website as Joboploilian. The site is designed in way that the employers post job vacancies and also have access to the Curriculum Vitae of applicants relevant to the positions available in their organisations. Searchers can also post their resumes and apply for advertised jobs.
Section 71, subsections (1-3) of the Nigerian Labour Act is opposed to the practice of paying money in exchange for a job. It states that no employer is allowed to operate a fee charging employment agency without the consent of the Minister of Labour and Productivity.
Night work contravention
Investigations reveal that many manufacturing firms in the Lagos area recruit casual workers who work in shifts. While some operate two shifts, morning and night, other operates three shifts, morning, afternoon and night. A recruitment officer, who identified himself as Adeniyiat the factory of a food maker in Oshodi, says that the secondary school certificate holders are recruited and are paid between N20,000 to N30,000 monthly. Although, Adeniyi notes that the work the casuals are recruited for is not tedious, almost all of them work at night based on the work schedule.
However, one aspect of the night shift factory work is the engagement of women and young girls. Some of the girls tell our correspondent that the motivation for them doing the night shift, which usually runs from 8pm to 5am, is the extra pay they get.
Section 55(1- 4) of the Nigerian Labour Act addresses the issue of night work in an industrial setting. It states that “no woman shall be employed on night work in a public or private industrial undertaking or in any branch thereof, or in any agricultural undertaking or any branch thereof.”
According to the subsection 3, the night work is a period of at least 10 or 11 consecutive hours, including the interval between 10 in the evening and five o’clock in the morning. The law, however, excludes women employed as nurses in private or public industrial settings or women who hold managerial positions.
Another exception is if approval has been granted by the minster and the 11 hours is “reduced to 10 hours on not more than 60 days in any one year in respect of any industrial undertaking if he is satisfied that the undertaking is influenced by the seasons of the year or that the reduction is necessary because of special circumstances,” on the condition that adequate provision for the transportation and protection will be provided for the women concerned.
Discrimination between outsourced and permanent workers
Outsourcing is a conventional employment model in which a third party employment agency handles the human resources aspect of the workforce for another firm. Kazeem Abdulwahab works for a Tier-1 bank in Lagos and earns N80,000 every month, but is an employee of a third-party company, which does not make provision for the workers to earn pension after retirement, nor enrol them under the National Health Insurance Scheme.
Highlighting the discrimination the casual workers are subjected to, Abdulwahab explains that the duty that is apportioned to the permanent workers is often shared with contract staff on the pretence of equality, but when it comes to productivity-based sharing of profit, they are excluded but the outsourcing firm benefits by having an increased quota to supply more workers. He states that although there are processes to convert the casual workers to permanent employees in some cases, the remuneration after conversion is still lower than that of graduate trainees.
Nigeria has yet to ratify the ILO Private Employment Agencies Convention 181 that regulates the activities of the agencies and ensure that fair labour practices are applied.
Outsourced workers and unionism
The President, National Union of Banks, Insurance and Financial Institutions Employees, Danjuma Musa, says moves to make the outsourced workers to belong to labour unions have started yielding positive results. According to him, unionisation will ensure that the rights of this category of are protected. He explains that the casual workers are averse to unionisation due to the fear of losing their jobs, adding that threats from employers contribute to this aversion because they make it one of the conditions of employment that the workers will not join any union.
Musa explains, “Most of the outsourced workers are unionised in the various banks but the challenges we are having is that some of them are refusing to belong to unions because people are not getting jobs as expected, and considering the process of employment and the number of people in the labour market.
“One of the conditions given to the workers in the employment contract is that they are not permitted to join any union. It is one of the major challenges we are having. Virtually all of them are unionised but some that are not unionised do so because of directives from the management that they should not join labour unions.”
The President, Human Capital Providers Association of Nigeria, Mr. Neye Enemigin, condemns the practice of collecting money in exchange for jobs. HuCaPan is an association of professionals who are licensed by the Ministry of Labour and Productivity to recruit for companies and outsource workers.
According to Enemigin, there are certain conditions that intending recruiters must meet before they are issued licences. He says outsourcing firms must show evidence of registration with the National Pension Commission, a Health Management Organisation and evidence of Group Life Insurance coverage for the workers. In addition, states that it is expected that letters of employment should be issued to the workers, who are not to be denied the right to join unions of their choice as enshrined in Section 40 of Nigerian Constitution and the International Labour Organisation Convention 87(5), which prescribe freedom of association as a fundamental right for workers.
The HuCaPAN president explains, “Even at that, there is a lot of misconception. It is neither the right of a union to unionise the people, nor that of the employer or the government; it is the individual worker’s decision. That is why we call it freedom of association. If the person does not want to belong to a union, no union or employer has the right to resist them.
“When you take people and give to companies, they are not casuals, they are entitled to all the labour provisions on decent work, health and safety and sustainable income.”
While differentiating between casual and contract workers, he explains that a casual employee is someone who is given a temporary job that should not exceed three months, while a contract worker can only be regularised based on the decision of the employer.
“From my experience, about 99.9 per cent of the service agreement is skewed in favour of the principal. It is take it or leave it, because there are so many people that are willing to take it if you refuse to. The issue is that the service providers are not united. Not all of them are under HuCaPAN and are bound by its code of conduct. But if anything happens to the workers, the principal cannot say they are not its employees,” Enemigin emphasises.
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