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Punching above their weight - Nigerian trade unions in the political economy of oil
Abstract
The purpose of this thesis is to explore trade union agency and its limits in an African country that is highly dependent on oil. The overall research question is: What are the opportunities and constraints to trade union agency in Nigeria? This case study of the Nigerian trade unions focuses on the 2012 fuel subsidy protests that constituted among the biggest popular mobilisations in Nigerian history. Many of the Nigerian trade unions’ achievements over the last decades relate to their leading role in the recurring and successful resistance against fuel subsidy removals. This is widely recognised, but insufficiently understood, and the unions are both over- and under-estimated in terms of their capacities.
The thesis addresses a research gap on African trade unions. It is motivated by an apparent paradox. On one hand, are theoretical dismissals of the relevance of trade unions, in assuming that there is a limited civic agency and space for trade unions in African states and in petro-economies. On the other, are reports of widespread labour rights abuses from many African governments and employers, undoubtedly due to the significance of the unions. Additionally, whereas emerging studies of civic agency in Africa tend to focus on relatively disempowered groups and informal labour, the focus on the strategically positioned trade unions into the analysis opens for a renewed conversation about state–society relations, the constitution of power and discussions about the capacities of social actors to engage with structures.
Theoretically, the thesis engages with the concepts of agency and power. Power is understood as inherent properties or capacities of an actor, while agency concerns the subjective, reflexive and purposeful realisation of these capacities. Agency is further considered as relational, contextual and historical. In understanding the unions’ contexts and relations, the thesis emphasises a holistic understanding of labour’s multiple roles and relations in what I have called the ‘labour triangle’: state, market and society. Methodologically I have used an extended case method, which is reflexive in nature, combines fieldwork and interviews with theoretical explorations, and implies moving between scales and levels.
As agency is rooted in history, the introductory chapter emphasises the specific historical formation of state, market and society in Nigeria. The Nigerian state is characterised by prebendal elite politics, a federalised and divided governance system with divisions according to regions and ethnicities, as well as parallel social logics of the civic and the ‘primordial’ publics. The unions are rooted in a modern, civic public. Although the state has attempted to control the unions, they operate largely autonomously. The Nigerian economy is dominated by oil and a large informal sector, and there are deep class divisions horizontally, between the haves and the have-nots; the elites and the popular masses. Additionally, there are social divisions vertically in terms of ethnicity, religion and region. Although these divisions have at times disturbed union efficiency and the relevance of class identity for mobilisation, the unions largely cut through these separations. Within the unions, ideological divisions between radical and reformist are more prominent. While the oil resources have fuelled the distanced relationship between state and citizen, a growing sense of injustice caused by the lack of redistribution and of popular benefits from the oil resources has been a source for trade unions’ mobilising power. This, together with the workers’ strategic position in the oil economy, allows the unions a particularly strong structural power.
The thesis consists of three articles. The first article – Nigerian unions between the street and Aso Rock: The role of the Nigerian trade unions in the 2012 fuel subsidy protests
– critically examines the trade unions’ contested positions and actions during the 2012 protests. Whereas unionists described the outcome as a victory and demonstration of popular sovereignty, fellow protesters expressed anger towards the unions for unfulfilled democratic opportunities and accused the unions of succumbing to bribery. The article shows in practice how the unions’ capacities to mobilise, strike and negotiate were instrumental in the reinstatement of the subsidy, and also how the unions’ agency is both enabled and constrained by their embeddedness in the state, society and the market.
The second article – Casualisation and conflict in the Niger Delta: Nigerian oil workers' unions between companies and communities – explores the particular opportunities and constraints to organised oil workers’ actions. Although the 2012 fuel subsidy protests mobilised an unprecedented number of people on the streets, the government did not call for negotiations until the oil unions threatened to shut down oil production. However, production was never shut down, and the oil unions were criticised for ‘empty threats’ and for abandoning their historical democratic and social role. Based on the premise that the conditions for labour actions are found at the local and industrial workplace levels, the paper explores how processes of informalisation of labour (casualisation) and conflict interlink and affect the local labour regime and the oil unions’ powers in the Niger Delta. It shows how the labour fragmentations and erosions of labour power from casualisation are exacerbated when unfolding into this context of conflict and social fragmentation. Despite the oil unions’ strategic position in the oil industry and their relatively high union density, these processes have challenged both their capacity and will to mobilise, strike and bargain.
The third article – Popular protest against fuel subsidy removal: Nigerian trade unions as mediator of a social contract – explores the popular idea that cheap fuel is an economic right for Nigerian citizens, and is part of a social contract. In contrast to perspectives that underscore the lack of civic opportunities in the relations between the state and its citizens in Nigeria, the article proposes that the protesters asserted and claimed deeper citizenship. They did so by rallying behind the fuel subsidy as a social right, and also by utilising civil rights to bargain and political rights to participate. Here, the trade unions played a critical and mediating role, based in their specific industrial citizenship, with collective forms of representation, organising and bargaining. This social contract is fragile however, and the unions’ roles as mediators of this social contract are both critical and contested.
In addition to expanding our understanding of an African trade union in an oil-dependent economy, this thesis opens for a renewed conversation about state–society relations, power and agency. Whereas agency studies from Africa have focused on relatively powerless actors and the tactical agency of getting by, studying the agency of the relatively powerful unions reveals their ability to influence the surrounding structures. Trade unions have strategic powers in relation to state, market and society in their ability to mobilise socially, hurt the economy through strike action and negotiate with elites in state and market. This allows them to play a far greater role than their relative size suggests. Although Nigeria is among the most difficult countries for unions to operate in, the Nigerian trade unions have contributed to ensuring social benefits to Nigerians through cheap fuel, and they have been a counterforce to the expansion of informal and patronage relations at the workplace. They have additionally contributed to strengthening civic relations and state institutions through a mediating role between state and citizen. The study clearly shows the need to engage with trade unions in the study of power and politics in Africa.
... On the one hand, the liberal paradigm sees subsidy as a form of political settlement where elites buy off ordinary citizens with cheap fuel (Lockwood, 2015) that is financially, socially and environmentally efficient (Skovgaard and van Asselt, 2018). On the other, the popular idea of cheap fuel has been seen as a question of social rights and the just distribution of oil wealth (Guyer and Denzer, 2013;Houeland, 2017). However, as much as the 2012 protests were historically significant, most analyses only indirectly link them to institutional politics and emphasise their temporal character and limited impact. ...
... In this paper, I have utilised material from my PhD research, which considered the power and agency of Nigerian labour in the context of the political economy of oil, which centred the fuel subsidy protests (Houeland, 2017). I undertook an extensive literature analysis and conducted interviews with activists and trade unionists in my 2012-2014 fieldwork. ...
... In practice, the poor are particularly vulnerable to fuel price increases, as they drastically affect inflation and decreases in real income. In oil-producing countries where social benefits are few and the state's capacity for welfare is weak, such as Nigeria, cheap energy is often considered a right and minimum entitlement (Guyer and Denzer, 2013;Houeland, 2017). ...
This article explores relations between popular protests and institutional politics in a petroleum-dependent economy. The 2012-protest against fuel subsidy removal in Nigeria was one of the biggest popular mobilisation in Nigeria’s history, and possibly the largest in the wave of protests in Sub-Saharan Africa. This article uses perspectives of contentious politics that bridge structure and agency through a focus on relational dynamics between protests and institutional politics. This article makes four interrelated claims of how the protests are conditioned by and contribute to institutional politics: First, the protests builds on a historical trajectory of labour-led subsidy protests that in itself form part of institutionalised politics. Second, the 2012-protests were historically large due to the particular context of a decade of democracy and oil-led growth, without a popular sense economic justice and real political participation. Third, while new actors came to the scene in 2012, intra-movement fragmentation exposed trade union and civil society weaknesses and failure to build a sustained social movement. Fourth, the 2012-protests inspired civic agency and influenced institutional politics and state-citizen relations, especially reflected in party politics and elections.
... Social movement unionisma 'citizenship movement' in which labour struggles engage with the boundaries of citizenship (ibid.)was a strategy of expanding mobilizing power by aligning with non-labour organizations and engaging in issues beyond the workplace, to address the declining structural power of liberalization and declining membership in the 1980s. In Nigeria, that process is intimately linked to the politics of fuel subsidy (Houeland 2017). ...
This article brings new perspectives on state–citizen relations in African petro-states by analysing the role of Nigerian trade unions in the recurring fuel subsidy protests. Nigerian trade unions have played an instrumental role in protests against fuel subsidy removals since the mid-1980s, most recently in the massive 2012 protest known as ‘Occupy Nigeria’. Based on the idea that the fuel subsidy forms part of a social contract in Nigeria, and through revisiting T. H. Marshall’s seminal work on citizenship and industrial citizenship, I propose that the protests are sites for popular assertions of broader citizenship, as people rally behind the fuel subsidy as a social right and affirm political rights to participate and civil rights to bargain. This article further argues that the trade unions act as a mediator between state and citizens – that is, embedded in their industrial citizenship with collective forms of representation, organizing and bargaining. In this way, Nigerian trade unions have kept their relevance for workers and beyond, despite eroded labour rights. However, this social contract is fragile, contextual and contradictory, and the mediating role of the unions carries challenges and ambiguities, which became particularly clear in the 2012 protest.
In the Nordic countries, unions are represented in company boards and can influence companies’ policies toward labor abroad. This article focuses on the Norwegian national oil company Equinor and its support of unionization of its employees in Tanzania. This was inspired by the Nordic tradition of social dialogue between corporations and strong, independent unions. Corporation managers and union representatives tend to refer to this social dialogue as “the Norwegian model,” but this is a narrow conceptualization of the model that disregards the role of the state. I argue that while it is beneficial for the Tanzanian workers to be organized, it is probably also “good for business” to have unionized workers who have adopted the Nordic collaborative model, rather than a more radical union model.
Castles, S., Arias, M., Koleth, E., Kim, C., Ozkul, D. and Williamson, R. (2011). ‘Karl Polanyi and Understanding Social Transformation’, Social Transformation and International Migration in the 21st Century Working Paper No 1, Sydney: University of Sydney.
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The objective of this paper is to examine the dynamics of collective bargaining machinery in both the public and private sectors in Nigeria; with a view to bringing to the fore the peculiarities associated with both sectors with regard to the practice of bargaining. To achieve this objective, the paper adopts a theoretical approach. The author observes that the practice of industrial relations as a discipline and that of collective bargaining in particular emanated from the private sector the world over. Thus, much of the practices of public sector collective bargaining are modelled after the private sector collective bargaining. However, in Nigeria, the obverse is the case as collective bargaining gained its root in the public sector owing to the near absence of private sector at the turn of the century. However, in Nigeria, the public sector pays lip-service to the collective bargaining machinery. Governments at all levels (Federal, State and Local) have continued to set aside collective bargaining and to give wage awards to score political points in spite of its commitment to the ILO Convention 98 to freely bargain with workers. The State or the government in the course of regulating wages and employment terms and conditions revert to the use of wage commissions. Thus, wage determination is by fiat. This preference for wage commissions can at best be regarded as a unilateral system as collective bargaining is relegated to the background.Wage tribunals or commissions offer little opportunity for workers’ contribution in the determination of terms and conditions of employment and can hardly be viewed as bilateral or tripartite. Thus, the State preference for wage commissions is anti-collective bargaining. In spite of Nigeria’s commitment to Conventions of the ILO with particular reference to such Conventions as 87 of 1948 and 98 of 1949 which provide for freedom of association and the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively. Thus, the use of wage commissions is antithetical to collective bargaining.