AirtelTigo redundancy talks appear to progress after dispute ends over settlement

Tuesday 23 January 2018 | 10:50 CET | News

A roadblock has been removed in redundancy negotiations following the merger of Airtel Ghana and Tigo Ghana, Adom News reported. A severance pay formula had been agreed upon in November but then retracted once the merger was approved, it added. The breach has since been corrected, the news agency said.

The first batch of senior staff who received notice of their retrenchment packages rejected them out rightly, accusing management of using a strange formula that short-changed workers significantly. 

Following the rejection, a group of staff calling themselves the Concerned AirtelTigo Workers accused management of side-stepping the provisions of a workers’ handbook and an agreed formula. Amid the stalemate, management had a meeting with executives of the Network of Communications Reporters (NCR), a group of ICT journalists, where the matter was discussed at length.

The workers had alleged that in November 2017, management presented a formula at their first durbar (session), proposing two months’ gross salary without benefits for every year of service, plus three months' gross salary with benefits including Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) contribution, medical, airtime and gross salary as basic and monthly allowances (car, housing/rent).

According to the workers, this formula was what management presented to the National Communications Authority, National Labour Commission, and the Ministry of Communication, prior to the approval of the merger. Even though the package was not negotiated with workers, as required by the Labour Law, the workers said they were satisfied with the formula, so they did not question it.

After the merger had been approved, however, management suddenly set aside the formula and resorted to a totally different one that short-changed them, particularly Airtel workers. Some say the new formula made some of them lose up to 40 percent of what they would have received under the original proposal.