ABSTRACT
The discrepancy in the political and socioeconomic climate in which this research took place suggests that most businesses were passing through critical stages of their history. The process of selecting the case studies ensured that the manufacturing firms came from different geographical locations. The presence of an employee union in the factory apart, the workers in the Chinese firm had less autonomy than their counterparts in the Hausa and Lebanese plastic firms. The subject of wage bargaining is central to understanding entrepreneurial behaviour towards workers in a developing country like Nigeria. In the non-unionised firms, the prevalence of individual bargaining and managerial wage discrimination among workers performing comparable tasks are among the causes of employee frustrations and industrial unrest. Most of the collective agreements often reached between employers of labour and their employees in the non-unionised firms were neither implemented nor considered binding by factory management.
