Workers of Mormar Marines Ltd, a pipeline surveillance firm in the Oil Mining Lease, OML 3O, shut down oil installations in the Oil Mining Lease, OML 30 on Thursday because the company and the Nigeria Petroleum Development Company, NPDC owed them back pay.
The workers who converged at the Pigging Manifold in the Erhiemu oil field, Ughelli North Local Government Area, Delta State, said they were forced to close the facilities run by joint venture partners NPDC, Heritage, and Shoreline because they could no longer go hungry.
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 still being owed them.
Addressing newsmen at the Pigging Manifold, a Mormar Marines Ltd, Coordinator in the company, Comrade Lucky Ofuomukoro said they had been on protest at the manifold since Wednesday last week to register their grievance with no positive response from NPDC.
He said: “In December last year, 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 now did a protest in this particular place and 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 momment, 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”.
Another Coordinator, Mr. Paul Agbama lamented the “marginalization and oppression metted on the surveillance workers. We have been on this job for many years but recently, our salaries are not coming regularly which is not fair.
“We have decided to shut down so that they will call us and pay our salaries.”