By VICTOR AHIUMA-YOUNG

RECENTLY, Labour Vanguard published the first part of Comrade Sylvester Ejiofoh response to its story on takeover of trade unions by bourgeois labour leaders. Today’s edition of Labour Vanguard is the concluding part of the interview.

HOW can workers reclaim the unions from aristocrats and proprietors posing as labour leaders?

The essential thing is education, labour education and the right type of labour education. Labour education cannot be value free, while addressing the technical issues like how do you resolve grievances with employees, how do you gain concessions from employers by way of collective bargaining, etc, but collective bargaining has a class character, it has a social character. So, you do not just teach collective bargaining in the formalistic sense. You must look at its underlying factors.

Collective bargaining is essentially or to some extent, a procedure which manifests power relations. You cannot have meaningful bargaining or bargaining process that ends up in a balanced or shared gain. A weak union cannot bargain with a strong employer. A non-democratic union in which the leadership does not represent the aspirations of the rank and file members cannot bargain meaningfully.

*Comrade Sylvester Ejiofoh

Nigerian development

So, you have to use appropriate labour education, which is a combination of techniques, knowledge, skills and the context of trade union as a movement. Anything short of that, the problem will persist. It is not a phenomenon which is to a large extent, a Nigerian development. It is a global development.

There are allegations that some labour leaders conspired with  officials of the Ministry of Labour and Productivity to effect changes in their constitutions for their personal greed. What is your take on this?

Well, like a society in which anything is possible, ideally, the registrar of trade unions can only effect changes in union’s constitutions if those amendments are product of trade union conferences, and in keeping with the provision of the trade union act which provides for what trade union’s constitution should contain.

Again, there is other aspect which you must look at. When trade unions do not conform to trade union tradition, the tendency is that other elements come to play. What you may call primordial elements or cleavages like ethnicity or religious cleavages. We are lucky that these elements are not very strong in our country.

It has to do with the value system of the leaders, why trade unions emerged and how they emerged. Ideally, appointed union’s officials should emerge from working class. That is from those who were employees, and members of the unions.

If you are never a wage earner and did not start your trade union career from the shop steward or the branch level and grew up and in the process, gone to trade union classes, and enhanced your academic qualifications before you become a full time official, there is a problem, a problem of being disconnected from the expectations and behaviours of the working man and woman.

If you are employed directly from outside in which case, you came in as there is a labour market, you came as unemployed, you lack the culture of the working man and woman. But where you started your trade union career before you became full time official from the rank and file, you pay union dues and you go through appropriate labour education, you can hardly become aristocratic or bureaucratic.

When those elected too, did not pass through same mills, they have problems. Unlike politics, you know in Nigeria, you can join a party within a year of two, you can become the presidential candidate, but in trade union, ideally, the movement should be from the shop steward level.

Elected officials, who passed through that process and had the opportunity of being trained in the right manners, will not be proprietors. They will appreciate the fact that  the working man and woman who is a member of the union; is not an individual you can exploit.

What should be the life style of a labour leader?

Again, the social value of the individuals, trade union movement is not a place for poverty. Trade unions should be able to provide for their leaders but not to provide for them in sense of imitating the affluence character which characterizes the Nigerian leadership style in every respect.

A trade unionist either elected or appointed should not live in Victoria Island or Lekki Peninsular; they live in Yaba and Surulere and pay the same rent. The issue is not until you go in rags; leadership should be embodiment of simplicity, humility and modesty. Where you decide to do otherwise, you have to fund it and to fund it, mean you must do funny things including employers’ funding.

There was a statement made some years ago, by one of late politicians whom I revered very well, Chief Enahoro. He said unions should beware of subversive generosity of employers and government. Where government funds your campaigns, where government assists unions to hold conferences, is it doing it without interest, covert or overt?

When government buys union’s cars, you may say yes, it is our money. I have not objection where Federal Government or state government goes to the National Assembly and say, look, we want to assist trade union educationally and it is in the budget and debated, it is done all over the world.

Subversive generosity

So, union must be very careful of subversive generosity from employers in particular and government. The issue is, how will the ordinary worker view it, that his or her union is longer independent of the employer which is a major attribute of a trade union?

Any union which is not independent of the employer or government directly or indirectly cannot be said to be a democratic union. Definitely, he who pays the piper dictates the tune. So, you now have this aberration in the country when Nigerian trade unions are more active, more resolute under the military and a little bit care free under the so-called elected civilian authorities.

Equally, the government and employers should know that where you decide to subvert the independence of the trade unions, the reactions from the rank and file members when they find out at the time of crisis, the union cannot control them. So, both sides must know that it is not their best interest to subvert trade union independence.

So, they could ask questions on the  funding of the union.  Equally, on the part of those appointed, their salary or income should not be a secret. People can ask how come he is now driving a jeep of this dimension. I am not preaching the gospel of poverty, no. Whatever we do, we must be ideal union leaders, be modest, humble and simplistic.