Uyai-Abasi Etido
The workers of Mormar Marines Ltd, a pipeline surveillance firm, have been forced to shut down oil installations in the Oil Mining Lease, OML, over the non-payment of backlog of salaries owed them by the company and Nigeria Petroleum Development Company, NPDC.
Displaying placards which bore various inscriptions such as “You cannot owe us and disengage us”, “NPDC, stop this divide and rule”, “We are comfortable working with Mormar Marines,” among others, they said NPDC had concluded plans to terminate their jobs without any arrangement to pay them the six months outstanding salaries.
Addressing to reports, representative of the workers, Lucky Ofuomukoro said they had been on protest at the manifold since last Wednesday to register their grievance with no positive response from NPDC.
In his words:“Last December, the management of Mormar Marines Ltd called us for a meeting where they told us that the job has been terminated and we said if they no longer need our services, we have to quit. We told them to pay the salary they were owing us so that we can go to our houses.
“At the end of the day, the management of the company called us for a meeting where we told them to extend the job and they told us to go back to our duties which we did.
“At the end of March, they promised that there will be order to extend the work, but to our greatest surprise, they called us to say that the work has ended. We came back here since last week telling them to pay our salaries, but till this moment, nobody from NPDC, Heritage and Shoreline has come; they just left us like that.
“We don’t have power to damage the facilities, the only power we have is to shut them down and that is what we have done.”
