The Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC) Prof.Tunji Olaopa has outlined measures to considerably reduce labour disputes in the country.

Prof. Olaopa spoke at the second Annual National Labour Adjudication Forum of the Nigeria Employers’ Consultative Association (NECA) in Abuja on Tuesday.

According to Olaopa, although workplace disputes are inescapable, they hardly play out as positive occurrences.

“Neither are they ever well-managed, well-timed, and controlled so they could be springboard for a win-win resolution in a measure that presents veritable potential for enhanced national productivity”, he said.

To Olaopa, whereas workplace conflicts are inescapable, as the absence of conflict does not mean that there are no threats to industrial peace, the ability and commitment of the social partners to negotiation and social dialogue in a manner that does not degenerate into militancy-induced irresolvable differences is the key to industrial peace and harmony.

He lamented that adversarial industrial relations have been somewhat elevated to a national culture in dispute resolution and this has created disturbing road blocks to consensus building.

Among the factors that are responsible for a culture of labour disputes, according to him, are a lack of respect for terms of collectively bargained agreements because conclusions thereto were reached under duress in a manner that usually creates industrial peace of the graveyard.

He also listed a lack of political sophistication to unravel the legal, structural and systemic issues that have hindered an unfettered implementation and enforcement of relevant labour laws in Nigeria.

Olaopa decried some of the provisions of the labour laws which are perceived to be crafted to favour some parties against the others while some others are obsolete outright and ineffective to address modern workplace disputes.

“There is also the consequence of the huge knowledge and information gaps on the part of some key actors in the labour movement. This dimension plays out, many times, as intellectual emptiness, one that makes meaningful contribution to discourses that are game-changing in the dynamics of national change management practically impossible.

“A number of these unreflective ideological mental models foreclose seminal engagement and an objective interrogation and therefore understanding of the national binding constraints that must be dismantled by government in order to achieve the national flourishing and sustainable prosperity that will in time translate to life more abundant for the Nigerian workers.”

But according to Olaopa , many of the agencies at the heart of regulatory control of the dynamics, like the Federal Ministry of Labour and Employment and others that exercise jurisdiction over work-related matters, “suffer significant capacity deficits, professional creativity, resourcing including funding to carry out their statutory duties in measures that sometime smack of abdication of responsibility.”

He noted that the most worrisome dimension is the reigning industrial relations culture of impunity in the labour sector with significant elements of indiscipline and dishonesty in industrial dispute practices with poor corporate governance issues.

He listed these as the non-remittance of check-up dues, sit-tight syndrome,
lack of accountability,
absence of democratic tenets, and dictatorial tendencies in labour relations.

For Olaopa, industrial harmony can only be ensured with a shift from traditional mediation approaches to transformative mediation as “the basis for recalibrating social dialogue within framework of tripartism .”

Defining, transformative mediation, Olaopa said it “essentially calls for reform to address the undercurrents that cause industrial disputes to degenerate into irreconcilable ideological differences, reminiscent of that carry-over from the era of military rule and the old Marxist-Communist revolutionary aluta-type class struggle

“It demands concerted out-of-the-box innovative solution backed with the will power to break down and dismantle the mental model that is generating adversarialism. It is only within such patriotic commitment to the common good that the tripartite can reach an agreement on a new model of partnership that will crystallize a developmental industrial relations framework for social dialogue and collective bargaining.

“This is especially critical in view of the current economic climate and fiscal challenge that the nation is trying to navigate. This especially, as it affects pay and compensation-related negotiations, so they can henceforth be done in good faith, and in a manner that inexorably instals technically-rational model to supplant the subsisting militancy-driven unsustainable approaches to securing wage and welfare concession for the Nigerian workers.”

“It requires shared vision, consensus building, regarding praxis, which has the potential for game- changing current dynamics and catalytic for realizing the goals of national development objectives that in turn demand a capable developmental state with win-win partnership with the key players that make up the tripartite”, he added .

He, however , noted that due to the reign of adversarial IR, critical issues that should feature in social dialogue like labour skills upgrade through training and re-training, technologies upgrade and conservation of capital from physical and economic destruction, factor reallocation that features in labour inspection and other regulatory activities, are now subdued in so far as they are not wage or welfare-related.

Thus, going forward, Olaopa noted that tripartism is in such a precarious state that the government needs to urgently convene a no-holds-barred platform for national conversation where all the parties in industrial relations system could reach an agreement on how they could work together to make the Nigerian social model work.

“ In this regard, the National Assembly should enact as a matter of urgency all pending labour bills that can strengthen the institution of social dialogue and alternative disputes resolution (ADR) mechanism in Nigeria

“The National Labour Advisory Council (NLAC) should be strengthened to accommodate larger stakeholders. Indeed, there is an urgent need to transform the NLAC into the National Labour Council that will involve diverse stakeholders in the management of labour issues as done by the National Economic Development and Labour Council (NDELAC) in South Africa which is deeply involved in all labour and socio-economic policy formulation and implementation in that country.

“The present mandate of the Industrial Arbitration Panel (IAP) should be expanded to include capacity building of stakeholders and facilitation of research in dispute management and resolution.”