Life is in flux and labour in Nigeria is caught in its crosswinds. To navigate the strong currents of change, and produce a compass, the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria, PENGASSAN, Port Harcourt Zone, turned to the union’s 2003–2005 president, Louis Brown Ogbeifun. They asked the 71-year-old former manager, Employee Relations of the conglomerate Nigeria National Petroleum Company, NNPC, to dissect the key issue of “Navigating Change.”
The President of the Trade Union Congress of Nigeria, TUC, Festus Osifo, who also doubles as PENGASSAN President, at the August 5, 2026, meet in Port Harcourt, laid bare the climatic changes in the oil industry and the unprecedented managerial and labour winds sweeping through the sector. For instance, he said, a primary reason why workers joined the union was for the protection of their jobs. So, when redundancy occurred, members were anxious that their names should not be included on the list. He said now workers in successful companies, who eye the attractive redundancy packages offered, lobby for their names to be included on redundancy lists.
Secondly, he said, the focus of unions in the highly casualized oil industry was how to convert contract staff to permanent employees. This, he said, has changed, with the unions realizing that they need to focus more on contract staff welfare, including high income and job security. This is more so as some workers are serving up to one or two decades as contract staff. So, the union strategy now is to unionize them and carry out Collective Bargaining Agreements, CBAs, for them. He explained that managements maintain the contract staff system in order to pay them low wages, but that if the pay packages of contract and permanent staff are narrowed, employing contract staff would become a disincentive.
