Baba Aye's

Introduction The 1st trilateral conference of Ghana TUC, Nigeria Labour Congress and Congress of South African Trade Unions held on May 4-6, 2010 at Accra, Ghana. The Conference arises as a response to the multifarious challenges confronting African working people in general and the working class in Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa, particularly. The Conference had evolved as an idea over the past six years based on the need to forge greater trade union unity across the African continent in the spirit of international working class solidarity. The persistent and continued underdevelopment of Africa and the pauperisation of its working people are traceable to the characteristic inequalities fostered by the capitalist mode of production, particularly in its neoliberal incarnation. The force socially positioned to checkmate and change this situation, being the working class; the need for the working class movement of our three countries to forge ever greater unity and solidarity, in th...

Introduction It gives me great pleasure to be asked to make this presentation. This is because on one hand, organization is at the heart of union building and should be considered crucial by any one in a trade union who appreciates the importance of Ralph Chaplin’s “solidarity forever” in its assertion that “the union makes us strong”. Organizing is at the root of that strength that the union gives. On the other hand, this is the fist time I will be taking a particular union’s secretaries/organizers, apart from my union MHWUN, on a course in organizing. I have had the privilege of being responsible as lead-facilitator of the NLC Harmattan School’s Organizers Course over the years and for taking the “trade union organizing” course in the NLC/Unijos Labour Law and Labour Relations Certificate course before proceeding for further studies two years back. I have also taken several unions (on the PSI platform) and specific unions on trade union issues in general. The specific context of toda...

An emergency meeting of the National Executive Council (NEC) of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) held on Tuesday December 15, 2009, and considered the report of the Committee on Deregulation it set up on November 12, 2009. After due deliberations on the report, NEC arrived at the following resolutions: 1. That NEC-in-session has taken note of all the submissions made to Congress organs and to the Committee on Deregulation. 2. That NEC is convinced that the petroleum sector needs a holistic restructuring in order to ensure stability of production, distribution and even pricing. 3. NEC also observes that corruption is endemic in the sector and immensely contributes to the problems of the sector. 4. NEC as a result of the above further resolve that while agreeing to the issue of restructuring of the downstream sector of the petroleum industry for effective delivery, it is unequivocally opposed to any increase in the prices of petroleum products and that government, as a matte...

Introduction   The Labour Party, LP, Nigeria’s fastest growing and ideologically rooted party, held its 2nd regular National Convention on Saturday, December 12, 2009 at the main auditorium of the Labour House in the Central Business District, Abuja.  The convention commenced with two lectures, in line with the party’s appreciation of the importance of education for a social-democratic party’s ideological development and cadres’ mentoring. Senator (Prof) Jonathan Silas Zwingina, Chairman, Centre for Legislative Development, presented the lecture on “Electoral Reforms as a Recipe for Good Governance”, while the second paper presented on “Curbing Corruption by Political Leaders: Challenges and Prospects”, was prepared by Justice Mustapha Akanbi, CFR, pioneer Chairman of the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission. The Convention was addressed by eminent personalities including: the first Executive Governor elected on the platform of the Labour Party H.E. Dr. Olusegun Mimiko, G...

"Human development is first and foremost about allowing people to lead a life that they value and enabling them to realize their potential as human beings" – UNDP 2006, Human Development Report Introduction The human race has come a long way from its humble beginnings when men and women were primitive gatherers of fruits, hardly understanding nature, not to talk of mastering it. Over the last three millennia, humankind has come to transform its environment and as well itself. Empires have arisen and fallen, so much wealth has been created by labour and several social-economic formations have been forged only to crumble. The last two hundred years after the industrial revolution, first in Britain however mark the historic leap of the possibilities of human development. In these centuries of the modern industrial society, more wealth has been created than that created in the preceding three thousand. Large-scale manufacture as the heart of industrial production has created mor...

1. Introduction The first multinational corporations were the East Indian Company established by the British in 1600 and the Dutch East Indian Company established in 1602 (Cf: Bowen et al, 2002; Glenn, 2007). These started as private corporations chartered by the states of their respective countries. These early multinational corporations were not only fully supported by their states and administered other lands under their countries’ flags, when the Dutch company ran into bankruptcy and would be liquidated, its debts were socialized, i.e. borne by the Dutch state, while its profits had always been private (Cf: Ricklefs, 1991). Since their not so humble beginnings four hundred years ago, multinational corporations have been a key feature of capitalist development as it spreads its fangs across the world. The globalization discourse in the past few decades has however given added fillip to the need for a deepened understanding of what multinational corporations are, what they do and ...