Nigeria’s telecom sector is on the verge of shutting down after over 800 members of the Private Telecommunications and Communications Senior Staff Association went on strike, threatening to cripple services across the country.
The organization, mostly made up of contract workers, warned of severe disruptions to telecom operations if its demands were not granted, potentially leaving millions of users without connectivity.
The strike began on Monday, and the union’s demands include, among other things, the return of some of its dismissed employees, union recognition, better working conditions, and payment of membership dues.
“The strike has become inevitable because of the prevalent precarious working conditions our members are enduring in the sector, the refusal of the employers to recognize and respect the constitutional right of these workers to freely associate with the union, and the unjust sack of three members of the union,” it stated in its seven-day strike notice.
Speaking with The PUNCH, the union’s Secretary-General, Okonu Abdullahi, said the association’s 800 workers play a significant role in managing critical infrastructure, such as base stations, for companies such as IHS, Huawei, etc.
“The implications of the strike will be massive because we have told all our members not to respond to any service outage from our employers. The fact remains that there are outages every day, and if our engineers do not respond to those outages, subscribers in those areas will be affected,” he said.
He said union members include field maintenance engineers, transmission engineers, customer service engineers, fiber engineers, and other critical staff working for telecom service companies.
