A trade union, the Hotel & Personal Services Senior Staff Association (HAPSSSA), has expressed concern over the exploitation and casualisation of hotel workers by the owners, who leverage the country’s high unemployment rate to carry out this act.
The president of the group, Comrade Iyeh Williams Adegbe, while citing the harsh conditions of service as a reason for his concern, reiterated that Nigerian workers in hotels are operating in slave camps, with over 60 per cent of the workers on casual.
In a chat with LEADERSHIP, Adegbe lamented the harsh economic situation battling every business set up and declared that the sector, despite casualisation and other unfriendly operations, has remained the last resort to cushion the effects of the hardship in the country.
According to Adegbe, “Most of the hotels in Nigeria today exist like a slave camp where the owners and the management are perpetrating all manners of anti-labour activities, except for a few responsible ones where there are labour unions; other hotels without unionism are slave camps.”
To him,” investors have realised that hotel business in a good location is lucrative; hence, the influx of hotels on every street in the urban cities, notwithstanding that most hotel owners are not fair to Nigerian workers.
“Workers in all other hotels that are not unionised are being denied the rights of freedom of association. They are suffering all forms of abuse without a voice. The truth is that the workers are interested in joining unions. Still, their respective employers keep on threatening them with losing their jobs if they attempt to identify with any organised Labour. This has been the trend in all hotels in Nigeria except the few organised ones.”
Moreover, he said, “we therefore once again call on federal government through the ministry of labour to call on all hotel owners and management in Nigeria to allow workers in their places a freedom to associate to enable them access to collective bargaining agreement (CBA) where the conditions of service are spelt out in prints for both workers and management and to be reviewed at an interval of time. I want to use this medium to commend them for keeping to the provisions of section 40 of the Nigerian constitution and also emphasise the freedom of association without intimidation in the Labour laws.”
