BEVERLY HILLS, June 14, (THEWILL) – Aggrieved workers at Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) on Thursday morning shutdown activities at the company’s Forcados Export Terminal in Delta state.
The terminal is Nigeria’s largest oil export terminal and processes Shell’s crude oil export from production facilities in the Western Operation.
The workers, who are contract staff of the company shutdown the company’s air, land and water transport activities saying they were unhappy over disparities in their wages, and terms and conditions of service recently introduced by the Anglo Dutch oil giant.
It was gathered that the disparity in wages favoured mostly non-indigenous staff and those connected to the company’s managers, to the detriment of host communities members.
“The thing is, they brought a new package for workers salaries. The package is called brown field, and was supposed to cover everybody.
“But they handpicked a few indigenes and mostly non indigenes, they increased their salaries from N100,000 – N316,000 and left most of the people behind.
“We have written many times to Shell to stop the disparity in payment method and to enhance workers welfare because as it is now, we are being treated like second class people in this facility,” a worker told The Nation.
At the time of this report on Thursday morning, it was gathered that the local management had called in military, which arrived in a number of vans.
