African seafarers to earn more as their wages upgraded to European standard

Funso Adeosun I

The International Transport Workers Federation (ITF) is set to adopt the European standard wage for African offshore workers.

The decision was borne out of the fact that the present wages by Nigeria and other African countries are

substandard compared to their European counterparts.
The President of Nigeran Merchant Navy Officers and Water Transport Senior Staff Association (NMNOWTSSA), Engr. Alalade Mathew who was one of the representatives of African offshore workers at the ITF London conference told our correspondent that the issue formed one of the basic topics of the conference.
Alalade noted that the new standard wage that would cut across the world offshore workers would be discussed at next year’s conference.
He said that before then, the European standard would be adopted pending when discussions would have been concluded on the matter.
In his words, “Before now we don’t have a standard wage that we are using .

“what we use was International Transport Workers Federation (ITF) on board vessels, the offshore own is a little bit lower to what we have now.
“So we dwell mainly on International Labour Organization (ILO) standard, it is a benchmark, the existing Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) that we have, we can still use it.
“But ITF will come up with the standard one before next year, we will go for another meeting where each country must have gotten their own and we will look into it.”

According to him, the idea is to develop a standard wage for maritime practitioners working in offshore saying “At least, we should have a standard wage. We have existing ones that we are using in European Union countries now
“We represented offshore in Africa and they asked for challenges for each country. Basically what we discussed about was offshore vessels. Supply vessels and they have their own standard there.

What we discussed mainly was on their wages on offshore and in Nigeria we are not yet there.
“We want to adopt that so that by next year, there will be proper adoption when regulatory bodies from other countries like Russia, America, and other countries. So we are working on having a suitable one now bit for now we shall be using the existing one in Europe now,” he stated.