A staff member at The Guaranty Trust Bank who wants to remain anonymous has said that many of them have had their services outsourced without their knowledge. Below we produce the full details sent to us by the source.
We were employed by GT Bank but to our knowledge we are going to be outsourced without any official communication from the bank. An agency called xsell, well it’s not even a company but a sole proprietorship business owned by one lady who gave us contracts as her employees. The contracts specified a temporary employment with no other benefits, we have been working for more than 4 years under that said contract which is illegal based on the labour laws as temporal employment should not be more than 1 year. Even though that is the case, we have been working for years with no benefits, no promotions and no salary increment.
We have complained to management on many occasions but all they tell us is to choose between staying or resigning. We decided to form a group with more than 113 employees and raised the issue but still no response from management. We later decide that we write to them, as soon as we did, they suspended 8 of our representatives just for demanding our rights. Now the other staff members are in solidarity with the eight asking management to either consider our demands and bring back the eight staff or we will all go on a sit down strike.
They never listened so we proceeded with the sit down strike on July 20. We now had meetings with our employer and GT bank together with officials from the labour department but unfortunately we ended the meetings with no solution. We found out that management is going around trying to persuade other members of the group to resume work so as to divide us.
We have gone to Foroya and other media outlets for we want the world to know what is happening, our rights have been exploited by xsell and GT bank over the past 4 years
At GT bank we have no medical allowance no transport allowance for the past 4 years, this has never changed our work schedule which is from Monday to Saturday with no bonus or overpay. With all of this, they are threatening to sack anyone who continues with the sit down strike and are forcing us to go to work. The labour act section 51 states that a temporary worker should not exceed 1 year, how can we be temporary workers for more than 4 years and the labour department is not doing anything bout this? They have to investigate the matter.
