Firm Urges Employers to Comply with International Labour Conventions
Oghenevwede Ohwovoriole in Abuja
Coralworker.com, a firm that specialises in training and securing employment for people without education and skill, has urged employers in Nigeria to comply with international conventions on labour.
The company also recognised some employers of labour for being compassionate and human to their domestic workers and contributed to their personal development.
The Chief Executive Officer of the company, Lynda Ogbonnaya made the appeal while presenting an award of recognising to the Managing Director of TILT Group, Chief Habeeb Okunola in Abuja recently.
Ogbonnaya noted that TILT Group was honoured for their exemplary leadership towards its unskilled staff members.
According to her, most domestic workers in Nigeria receive peanuts as salaries. What such workers earn monthly is not commensurate with the rate of inflation in the country.
With around 130 million Nigerians living in extreme poverty, she said a lot of poor people are looking for immediate respite from poverty and hunger via jobs that will not require special skills, education, bureaucracy or encumbrances.
She said: “According to International labor organisations, we have laws that have been put in place. We have laws that Nigeria has not ratified yet, which we are mounting pressure on them to ratify so that we can lift workers out of poverty.
“Here, in Nigeria, we pay workers the barest minimum. But if you go to the market today, inflation keeps rising on a daily basis. But what is paid to workers does not commensurate with the rate of inflation.
“These people are our drivers, chefs, housekeepers, nannies and those in this category. We earn so much that we entrust them with our valuable children. Let us also look at the expensive schools we take our children to.
“We pay so much to send our children to school, where they are taught. They come back into the care of a nanny that we are paying peanut. The under-paid nannies will be in charge of our children for12 hours or more daily.”
She said her organisation enabled corporate employers, private individuals, multinationals, expatriates and the general public hire thoroughly vetted and trained domestic workers across Nigerian major cities.
She noted that the organisation decided “to honour Okunola because he has been supporting and providing resources for free training events, empowerment, sensitisation and more to help grassroots workers to gain and sustain their employment, thus keeping a large number of them out of the poverty loop.”
She therefore urged the government to show more commitment to the ratification of international Labour laws in order to achieve its target of pulling 100 million Nigerians out of poverty.
