ECG staff to demonstrate over severance pay

Staff of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) in the Eastern region will on Wednesday lay down their tools to demonstrate in all the 14 district offices of the company in demand for severance package as part of ECG Concession agreement.

At an emergency meeting held at the Eastern regional Office of ECG, the Local Chairman of Public Utility Workers Union (PUWU), Abraham Lincoln said if government has decided to put ECG on Concession and leverage some ECG staff to a new – Company, then there is the need for a severance package to be paid for the staff per the Labour Act.

However, the Sector Minister, Boakye Agyarko has refused to respond to their demands which has led to the decision to picket by the staff.

“I can’t say much about this new minister that we have at Energy because we have tried as much as possible to have an engagement with the Minister but unfortunately as PUWU and I am speaking as PUWU, if there is any other evidence of such nature to prove otherwise of what I am saying then the Minister must be able to tell us.

“We have not had a fruitful encounter with the Minister because he has failed to respond to all the correspondence that we have sent to him and that is another thing that I think is not helping the whole arrangement.”

He added, PUWU is disappointed and surprised by the lack of engagement that has been demonstrated by the present government with respect to key labor issues on the Private Sector Participation under the Compact 2 which is a sharp contrast to promises made to them by the President during the 2016 campaign.

According to him, the labour laws define clearly that whenever there is going to be an arrangement or amalgamation causes “severance of the legal relationship of worker and employee as it existed immediately before the close down, arrangement or amalgamation,” the worker is entitled to be paid by the employer, referred to as “redundancy pay.”