Intermodal Shipping Company Workers Cry Foul

Casual workers of the Intermodal Shipping Company Limited say the management of the company has deliberately ignored their Collective Bargaining Agreement(CBA) in the determination of who gets what after their forcible lay-off.

Only twenty-eight out of several hundred casual workers were given between 5,000 Ghana cedis and 11,000 Ghana cedis by management as severance award, denying the local union an official seat at the negotiation table as directed by the CBA.

Although the management said the union was consulted, Madam Christiana Adoo, Vice Chairperson, told the Ghana News Agency in telephone interview that she was on leave and therefore knew nothing about the arrangement.

According to the CBA sighted by the Ghana News Agency, management was obliged to contact and negotiate with the local union on such matters.

Mr Daniel Mensah, a causal worker of the company, told the Ghana News Agency that after working the quays, spending days and nights stuffing containers with cocoa beans and enduring the rain, hunger, thirst and mosquito bites for more than ten years as a casual worker, all that he could take home was 5,000 Ghana cedis.

According to him, he was told many times that if he worked hard, he would be made a permanent worker so, 'I put in all my heart, mind, body and soul into the work only to be laid off after ten long difficult years.'

Several workers told the Ghana News Agency stories of neglect, betrayal and hopelessness endured in an atmosphere of modern slavery and contempt.

The company had earlier held an uncompromising stand, arguing that casuals were not covered by any conditions of service and that they worked for their wages and did not deserve any other form of compensation.

But Article three of the company's CBA which came into effect on 4th January 2016 says,' This agreement shall apply to all permanent, probationary and non-permanent employees of the Company on or before the date of this agreement'.

In an earlier conversation with the Ghana News Agency, Mr Van- zyl Rhett, the South African born Managing Director, Intermodal Shipping Company branch in Ghana, sympathised with the workers describing them as' poor Ghanaian workers, who work so hard but not aggressive enough to assert their rights.'

' The Company has enough money to give them handsome redundancy packages. If this had happened in South Africa, the workers would have burnt the company's properties,' he said.

But Mr Rhett, a son of Dutch immigrants, whose kind rose to political power in South Africa in the 1940s only to legalise segregation (apartheid), which dehumanised and disinherited black South Africans for many years, had a sudden change of mind, thus swapping his sympathy narrative to one of indifference.

'Once the workers have accepted the package that is the end. And those who did not get anything can go to the Ghana court,' he said.

Intermodal Shipping Company Limited, the Israeli flagged company, is vehemently opposed to the payment of any kind of redundancy to black casual workers.

Intermodal casuals in Nigeria and South Africa have been given handsome redundancy packages but Ghana's pro-investor labour laws, timid labour movement often render Ghanaian workers poor and susceptible to the manipulation of shylock investors.

GNA