Some workers of the National Lottery Authority (NLA) are unhappy with the management of the institution.
According to them, several attempts to get the leadership of the NLA to endorse processes to enable them unionize have proved futile.
Speaking on the Point Blank segment of Eyewitness News on Wednesday, General Secretary of the Financial Businesses and Services Employees Union of the Ghana Federation of Labour, Benjamin Mingle noted that since they began engagement with the NLA in 2016, nothing good has come out of it.
“Article 79 (2) talks of engagement between the union and management to decide on who can or cannot be part of the union so what we did was that we wrote to the management so that they could give us the organogram or structure of the company so that we can discuss and know those who by the job functions cannot be part of the union.”
“These are things that you discuss and agree on. In fact, the law says that if there is a disagreement you go for arbitration or mediation but, in this case, NLA refused completely. The series of letters and reminders have all been to no avail,” he said.
Mr. Mingle also complained that several calls by the National Labour Commission to the management of NLA were ignored.
He stated that: “The Labour Commission has written a series of letters of invitation encouraging the parties to meet. Never did NLA even respond to one letter. So based on that, we wrote to the Chief Labour Officer and applied for the collective bargaining certificate. The Chief Labour Officer also wrote to the NLA asking for the structure of the company to be able to determine those who can join or not. There were no responses so the Labour Commission went ahead and issued us a certificate.”
Meanwhile, Executive Secretary of the National Labour Commission, Ofosu Asamoah has said that they would need to see the certificates of the other unions before making a decision on the issue.
“We made an order and we met again on it but after the previous meeting, we realized that the Director-General told us that there were other unions who didn’t have certificates. We have the Ghana Federation of Labour’s certificate but the other supposed unions, we have not seen. So the Commission has made an order that we will direct the Chief Labour Officer to appear by Monday so that he shows the certificate because you cannot use conflicting directives,” he said.
Members of the Ghana Federation of Labour, however, have threatened to put down their tools if the National Lottery Authority does nothing about their requests.
