BY VICTOR AHIUMA-YOUNG

LAST week, after a tour of the multi-million dollars Dansa Foods Limited’s factory, a subsidiary of Dansa Holdings, situated in Abule Oshun, off Badagry Expressway, Lagos, Managing Director of Dansa Foods Limited, Mr. George Eremionkhale, spoke to Labour Vanguard on some labour related issues in the five years old organization .
Excerpts

WHAT is your staff strength and how will you describe them?

We have about 600 employees and we see them as number one in all we do because you can have all the state of the art equipment, but if you do not have the people and the enabling environment for them to freely express themselves professionally, all other investments will come to naught.

Eremionkhale

So, we are very mindful of that. From time to time, we have what we call “Family Meeting” where we allow for free expressions of their challenges. At that meeting, everybody is at the same level. You say what you want to say and nothing will be taken against anybody.

So, there is that free atmosphere for the expression of oneself and it has really helped because we found out that during such meetings we get know what ordinarily will not come out during our management presentations. In the meeting, we give sense of belonging to all members of the family knowing that because they can freely say all about their sections.

This cut across the line from the Managing Director down to the shop floor members of staff. We subject our employees to training and exposure to professional organizations, seminars and so on to keep them abreast with what is happening as far as their job is concerned. Recently some members of staff of our marketing Department were in Abuja for a Nigerian Institute of marketing training.

Similarly, we sent some of the staff to Lagos Business School, LBS, recently for training. The Human Resource Department has training schedule for members of the team from time to time to do what we call the in-house training. We have found out that over time in the business, you impact more on the job than you do in a class room setting.

So, we have a mentoring arrangement in the system where individuals are assigned to other individuals within the system for mentoring over the period. That has helped in the development of our members of staff.

Besides what you called a family meeting of staff, do you have union where workers elect their leaders to represent, protect and defend them when the need arises?

We do not have formal union in the company and we have not had any agitation of such. Again, if I look at what union is supposed to achieve for the workers, I guess that answer is already being provided otherwise, we would have the agitation for union over and over again.

If employees have a conducive working environment, they have a face-to-face meeting periodically with management staff and have direct access to their team leaders or management, I dare say is no need for union because those are things ordinarily the union wants to do for you if you have them in place.

You form union to be able to defend or protect your interest, to make sure you safety gadgets, to make sure that your work time is properly compensated for, to make sure you have the tools to work, to make sure you have your holidays, leaves, to make sure that you get your salary review at when due and things like that. But if you have those things happening and you also have performance incentives, what will need union for.

We have one for example which cost us about N8million for the month of October if you have this and others, why will you want to agitate for union? This is my personal opinion. But as for those other things that would create a conducive working environment, they are my responsibility and we have been striving to do that to the best of our ability.

As management, it is in our interest, it is also my own interest as the Managing Director to make those things available to get the best from the employees because at the end of the day, I have targets to deliver, I cannot have those targets to deliver with machine. I can only deliver the targets with members of staff.

There is common belief within organised labour that Dangote group is anti-union and that whenever there is agitation for union, it is always suppressed. There is also a limit to the freedom of expression in a “Family Meeting” chair by the MD than what happens in a union gathering. How do you respond to that?

Dangote is not anti-union. The Family meeting is just another way of making those things unions will want to put in place. But we all know how people would want to go to any length claiming to be representatives of workers who in actually sense, have hidden agenda. But I do not want to go into all that.

Conducive environment

As long as you create the conducive environment for yourself and the staff you have to do their job to best of their abilities, it is alright.

There is allegation that Dansa depends on over 90 percent casual workers who work on a very hostile condition. What is your response?

It is not true that 90 percent of our employees are casual workers. The truth is that we do not even have casuals. We have some functions that we outsource and this is a practice worldwide. Where you are not expert in or you are not configured as a company to provide that service economically, those functions is contracted out to service providers.

For example, you have some companies where their legal services, secretariat services and things like that are provided for by experts contracted to do those jobs because they are not your core operations. But that is not shying away from the fact that as a rule, some companies will say, I do not want people, I do not want to involve myself in paying and all those things that come along with full time staff.

I just want casuals. You cannot say that about Dangote. Dangote is about the single largest employer of people in this country. In term of investment in Nigeria, I do not think there is any other name that stands shoulder to shoulder to Dangote. We need to encourage and give him support in that regard.