Comrade, salaam alaikum and good morning.
YOUR article on “Causalisation and Informalisation of Labour” is a serious and well-structured intervention on an increasingly important Nigerian labour question which is the widening gap between the legal and institutional architecture of worker protection, and the actual structure of employment in the country.
Its central argument is that casualisation and informalisation are no longer peripheral labour-market phenomena. They are changing the composition of the working population itself. Temporary, irregular and weakly regulated employment increasingly shifts economic risk from employers to workers through insecurity of tenure, weaker bargaining power, inadequate benefits and reduced access to social protection.
I find four aspects particularly noteworthy.
I have started a series on political-economy beginning with an inquiry into “Taxation or Imposition: The State, Economy and Citizen in Nigeria.” My thesis is that state that increasingly taxes consumption, transactions and small informal economic activities while simultaneously failing to provide secure employment or universal social protection creates an important political-economy contradiction: the citizen becomes increasingly visible to the state as a taxpayer while remaining largely invisible as a protected worker.
First, the article correctly identifies a strategic problem for organised labour. Traditional trade unionism was largely built around identifiable employers, stable workplaces and permanent wage employment. But as employment becomes fragmented among contract workers, casual workers, informal operators and other non-standard arrangements, unions risk representing an ever-smaller segment of the actual labour force.
RELATED ARTICLE: Casualisation And Informalisation Of Labour: Time To Rethink Worker Protection; By Abdulkadir I. Isa
You therefore asked an important institutional question: can trade unions organised around yesterday’s employment model adequately represent today’s workforce?
Secondly, the article goes beyond wages and industrial disputes and raises the constitutional dimension. You invoked Chapter II of the 1999 Constitution – the Fundamental Objectives and Directive Principles of State Policy, particularly its concern with livelihood, suitable employment, humane working conditions and excessive concentration of economic resources.
The point you made is important: worker protection should not be viewed merely as a private contractual matter between employer and employee, but also as a question of national economic and social policy.
Thirdly, I find your policy recommendations as quite practical. Your call for a clearer definition of the employment relationship; wider opportunities for casual and informal workers to organise; a broader fair-work framework; expansion of health, maternity, occupational-injury and income protections; and legal mechanisms preventing workers from remaining indefinitely in supposedly temporary employment are very important.
ALSO READ: The Commodification Of Nigerian Democracy; By Abadom Lawrence Amechi
Fourthly, beneath the immediate labour question lies a larger argument about the political economy of contemporary Nigeria. You rightly observed that production remains collective and interdependent while employment is increasingly fragmented and precarious. The Marxian orientation that you adopted leads you to argue that casual and informal workers have not ceased to be workers merely because their contractual arrangements differ from conventional wage employment.
While the article quite rightly focuses predominantly on worker protection, Nigeria also faces a deeper transformation from a wage-employment society toward an informal livelihood economy. That would require asking not only how unions should protect casual workers, but why the formal economy is failing to generate sufficient secure employment in the first place.
This opens larger questions of industrialisation, MSMEs, taxation, productivity, automation, platform and gig work, social insurance, pension coverage, minimum wage enforcement and, most importantly, the relationship between employment creation and Nigeria’s economic development model that you may wish to examine in subsequent works on the labour question.
I have started a series on political economy beginning with an inquiry into “Taxation or Imposition: The State, Economy and Citizen in Nigeria.” My thesis is that state that increasingly taxes consumption, transactions and small informal economic activities while simultaneously failing to provide secure employment or universal social protection creates an important political-economy contradiction: the citizen becomes increasingly visible to the state as a taxpayer while remaining largely invisible as a protected worker.
Thanks so much for starting an important national debate on such a serious subject matter.
Warm regards and Jazakallahu khairan.
Being a reaction to Comrade Abdulkadir I. Isa’s article by Ambassador Usman Sarki. Amb. Sarki was Nigeria’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN, and writes from Abuja.
