The Maritime Workers Union of Nigeria (MWUN) has charged ship owners to comply with the agreement on the conditions of service and Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) for Nigerian seafarers, as signed recently all the stakeholders.
Speaking after the signing of the agreement on Tuesday last week in Lagos, the Deputy President General of MWUN, Douglas Eromobor told our correspondent that the union expects that all the companies must agree with the minimum wage for seafarers.
"We expect all the companies to comply with the signing of the agreement; they must come with the minimum wage for seafarers under the Maritime Labour Convention (MLC 2006)"
He however maintained that with the signing of the agreement, seafarers can now know what their wages are.
"With the signing of the documents, the seafarers now know their wages, what they are expected to collect"
"I am not with the documents to know how much their payments will be, but you know their monies as usually in Dollars"
"If the companies start implementing it, is a good thing for seafarers in Nigeria. On the issue of half-baked seafarers this complaint is coming from people who are illegally employing seafarers"
On the issue of fake certificate among seafarers, he accused illegal companies of trying to cut corners by engaging unqualified seafarers.
"All these mushroom companies that are into bunkering, are the ones using unqualified seafarers. The real seafarers under MWUN are genuine because the union will like to confirm your documents"
"For every seafarer, there are schools you take them to in other to confirm their level of training.
"NIMASA also sent them abroad for training as well. So I don't think anybody can say that Nigerian seafarers are not properly trained"
Eromobor also admitted that the issue of certificate forgery has been in existence before now.
"The issue of people forging paper is not new in Nigeria, so I will not totally write that off, I can still tell you that most people decide to past through the back door"
"But for the real seafarers that are working today, all records are still with NIMASA;the records and schools are still there and the companies have checked"
He lauded the apex maritime bodies for doing their best to correct the abnormalities in the sector.
"I think so far so good NIMASA has been able to correct some of those abnormalities. There are some companies that prefer using illegal seafarers, most of the seafarers they use are people from the villages who have not gone to the sea before", he added.
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