The Department of Petroleum Resources has invited the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria and an oil services firm, National Oilwell Varco, for a meeting to resolve an issue between them.
The DPR had earlier fined NOV $250,000 over its anti-labour practices, especially for sacking 23 Nigerian employees without due process in March 2020.
The notice of the meeting, which was contained in a letter signed by Ciroma A. I. for the director and Chief Executive Officer of DPR, will hold in Abuja on June 23, 2021.
In a demand notice, the DPR restated that it would not hesitate to sanction any oil company that failed to comply with the provisions of Article 15(a) of DPR Regulations and Article 20 of Nigeria’s Labour law.
It added that NOV had been flouting its directives since 2014 to emplace a Collective Bargaining Agreement before disengaging workers.
This followed PENGASSAN’s threat to shut down the nation’s oil and gas industry, if the management of NOV sacks any of its members again.
The Chairman of PENGASSAN, Lagos Zone, Eyam Abeng, stated this while responding to issues of anti-labour practices by NOV and urged the DPR to impose further sanctions on the firm if it continued to flout the country’s labour laws.
