The Nigerian National Corporation (NNPC) and 29 of its ex-casual workers of are at loggerhead over N4 billion severance package.
The ex-workers have appealed to human right activists and other well meaning Nigerians to get the package.
But NNPC management disagreed with their claims, advising them to seek legal redress.
Spokespersons of the disengaged causal workers, Eze Ene and Okolo Barnabas, said they lack the means to engage lawyers to sue NNPC.
NNPC’s Group General Manager Public Affairs Division, Ndu Ughamadu told our correspondent on phone there was nothing like ‘casual staff’ in the corporation.
He described the disengaged as daily- paid workers that NNPC must have engaged and should ordinarily leave when their services were no longer needed.
He recalled they were engaged in 1998 for NNPC corporate headquarters in Abuja while it was still operating from Lagos.
“If you are making claims and assuming that there was something like that in NNPC and you believe that NNPC engaged your services and you were not paid, you go to court. It is as simple as that,” he stated.
But the disengaged workers said: “We don’t have money to take them to court. They have money.
“They are even saying they will be happy if we will go to court so that they will frustrate it.”
They also explained: “The then Group Admin Service department engaged some casual workers here in Abuja for them to arrange documents in the different departments.
“They also engaged people to receive furniture and equipment from suppliers like Julius Berger. Some of us were engaged and put in charge of partitioning.
“But finally in 2000 they resumed in Abuja. In June 2000 they gave us to whom it may concern and called us casual staff under group services admin of NNPC.”
They said following the agitation of some of the senior casual workers, NNPC regularised their appointments as contract and permanent staff in 2004.
The group said suddenly in 2005, NNPC started saying it had no causal staff but daily paid workers.
They stressed the various departments were calling them casual staff in their memo and not daily paid workers.
Consequently in 2009, the corporation was already owed the staff for nine months, which has not been paid till date.
Lamenting, Ene said: “They should pay us off for over 15 years because we don’t know where to start life.
“In the existence of NNPC no casual staff has been set off without conversion.”