Warri — Operations of the Warri Refinery and Petrochemical Company (WRPC) may be affected as from today if the National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG) make good its threat to shut down the company, following the management's lackadaisical attitude to the supposed poor conditions of service of its 2,000 members.

Warri Zonal Chairman of NUPENG, Comrade Edmond Ofudje, told newsmen weekend that members of the union in the transport department of WRPC were being treated like slaves and warned that enough was enough.

According to him, the over 2,000 members of NUPENG in WRPC are set to shut down the operations of the company beginning from this morning.

His words: "We have citizens of this country that are working in the WRPC that are treated as if they are alien people; the system that WRPC and its contractors are operating is so dehumanizing and it is so frustrating.

"Sometimes you wonder if those people that operate this contract are Nigerians. We have members of NUPENG that are contract staff attached to their transport department, all of them are drivers and they have been on salary that has been stagnant for the past five years; they are being paid N25,000 per month.

"As we speak, this group of persons does not have a single paper in place or any form of condition of service regarding their employment and these persons have been working in WRPC for the past 17 years.

"We have many of them that have died in the course of service, nothing for the family, nothing for the children. We have been on this matter for the past three years, trying to appeal to WRPC to look at the plight of these workers, at least give them a living wage, but all these have fallen on deaf ears."

According to him, "the contract staff commenced a strike on Friday, October 23 and by the morning of Monday, October 26, if management of WRPC does not listen to good counsel, the in-house members of NUPENG will shut down.

"We are going to go on this strike in sympathy with what our members are suffering, in sympathy with what is on ground right now as we speak."

Comrade Ofudje said that "for every single NUPENG member that has one role or the other to play in WRPC will stop to play that role from Monday, October 26.

"We are going to join the strike and no member in WRPC will perform any function until this issue is resolve: 2,000 members of NUPENG in WRPC. Initially, we gave WRPC 14-day ultimatum and at the expiration of that, we gave them another one week and so the 21 days we are supposed to give to them have elapsed.

"Whatever we are trying to do with this total show down with WRPC is to protect the interest of the ordinary man and this is why we want members of the public to join hands to talk to the management of WRPC and their contractors to treat our members as human beings; they should give our members a living wage."