Mass Sack: 116 Ex-Employees Drag UBA To Court, Seek Payment Of 2bn For Unjust Dismissal

Sacked 116 staff of United Bank For Africa (UBA) have instituted a case before an industrial court praying the court to declare their dismissal as illegal.

The staff, in a joint suit, claimed that they were constructively dismissed by the bank.

The workers, through their counsel, Elvis E. Asia Esq., filed a complaint on March 13, 2020, with suit No. NICN/LA/112/2020.

They claimed that the “bank capriciously availed them loans as early as December 2019 to surreptitiously take back what will be due to them as terminal benefits.”

They explained to the court that the bank invited them to meetings at their various branches and asked them to resign immediately.

Their statement partly read, “They were further told that resignation was a condition precedent to being paid terminal benefits.

“The claimants wrote resignation letters but later discovered that they were already exited from the bank before they were asked to resign.

“They were denied access to the bank’s portal from the end of January 3, 2020, and the exit letters from the defendant were received from January 14, 2020, but backdated to January 3, 2020.

“The defendant perfected the mass sack before surreptitiously compelling them to resign to deny many of them their terminal benefits through loans availed them a few weeks before the sack.”

The staff claims that they were made to pay for insurance of the loan in the case of involuntary loss of a job but that UBA compelled them to tender resignation letters after the decision was made to exit them from the system.

They added that they “were paid meagre benefits, debited with the outstanding loans which ought to have been taken care of by insurance being that their employment was not brought to an end voluntarily, and during employment, they were subjected to discriminatory and unfair labour practices by the defendant.”

They prayed the court to declare that they were constructively and wrongfully terminated and that the personal loans given to them by the bank between August and December 2019 were unconscionable, oppressive and against all known tenets of corporate decency.

They prayed the court to grant an order cancelling the loans or ordering the Defendant to apply insurance proceeds to the payment of the outstanding loans and updating the claimants’ terminal benefits accordingly.

They also asked for the payment of N2 Billion for breach of contract and wrongful termination of employment.