THE RIGHT OF COLLECTIVE BARGAINING: A FARCE OR LABOUR RIGHT IN NIGERIA

Abstract

The illusory nature of the right of collective bargaining under the labour laws in Nigeria is hard to miss. While in one breath it may seem that the laws confer the right of collective bargaining on labour, the same laws by other provision appear to take away such rights with a vengeance.Thus, leaving the Nigerian workers with an overbearing legal framework for collective bargaining that approbates and reprobates, and an institutional framework empowered to severely constrain any lawful right of the workers to engage in collective bargaining. This paper, therefore, is a poignant critique on the state of the statutory control on the right of Nigerian workers to engage in collective bargaining. To achieve this task, it became imperative to consider a literature review on the conceptual and theoretical underpinning of collective bargaining. Following which the sources of the right of collective bargaining forming the basis upon which legal and institutional frameworks exist were also examined. Flowing from this background, this paper reveals that though the labour right of workers in Nigeria to bargain collectively for their welfare and conditions of service is recognised by law, it nevertheless falls short of the prescriptions of international labour standards on the right of collective bargaining. It is argued and posited that in the wake of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (Third Alteration) Act 2010 legal practitioners knowing their onions should be up and doing to locate the proper place of International labour standards in Nigeria’s corpus juris.