By Victor Ahiuma-Young

LAGOS —  NATIONAL Union of Railway Workers, NURW, has  warned against further retrenchment of workers in the Nigerian Railway Corporation, NRC, saying further retrenchment would rob the corporation of skilled and experienced employees.

Secretary-General of NURW, Comrade Martin Akinyanju, told Vanguard in a chat that frequent retrenchment of workers had been reducing efficiency of NRC, lamenting that about 39,000 workers had been lost to retrenchment between 1984 and 2005.

Akinyanju said the de-skilling of the NRC through retrenchment started when NRC staff strength was cut down from 55,000 in 1984 to about 13,000 in 1993, which was further reduced to 6,350 in 2005, excluding normal retirements.

His words: “About few weeks ago, the information got to us that the government and management are planning further retrenchment of the staff of the corporation. We tried our best as a union to meet the management to no avail. This led to the union issuing an ultimatum hoping that the management would meet us to discuss especially when we learnt that the retrenchment of 2006 would be carried out in 2010.