BREAKING NEWS, Business
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The Nigeria Labour Congress says it will treat any slash of the current minimum wage of N18,000 as declaration of war and will call out workers to fight against it
THE Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, has warned that any attempts by the Nigerian state governors to slash the N18,000 minimum wage of workers would amount to a declaration of war. And that the NLC would not hesitate to mobilise Nigerian workers to fight against it.
Ayuba Wabba, president of the NLC, gave the warning in a statement issued on Sunday, November 22, while expressing concern over the move by the governors, who met under the auspices of the Nigerian Governors’ Forum, NGF, on Wednesday, November 18, and declared that after the meeting, to reduce the minimum wage.
Wabba said that congress was shocked by the statement credited to Governor Abdulaziz Yari of Zamfara State and chairman of the NGF that the N18,000 national minimum wage promulgated into law in 2011 was no longer sustainable because of the fall in the price of crude oil.
The NLC boss said: “For the record, the 2011 National Minimum Wage Act came into existence after almost two years of agitation and negotiation by the tripartite of government (represented by both the federal and state governments), the Nigerian Employers Consultative Association, NECA, representing other employers (in the private sector) and organised labour.
“This is in the best tradition of a tripartite negotiation recognised and codified by the International Labour Organisation.
“As organised labour, we submitted a request for N52,000 and provided justification for it as the minimum wage which a worker and his recognised legal dependents need to live a healthy life over 30 to 31 days in a month.”
Wabba said it was out of labour’s “patriotic disposition and consideration” that the unions reluctantly agreed to the N18,000 minimum wage, even though it deemed it grossly inadequate as a living wage.
“Many of the state governments who submitted memoranda to the tripartite negotiating committee recommended figures that were far above the N18,000 that was eventually agreed.
“The governors cannot, therefore, want Nigerians to take them seriously by their present claim that the current national minimum wage was ‘imposed’ on them!
“For us in the Nigeria Labour Congress, we know as a fact that their ability to pay minimum wages is not the problem of the economy. The problem for states and other tiers of government is what the high number of political office holders and their unproductive aides take away as wages.
“For the private sector, the creed to accumulate more and more profit is also always a motivating factor to keep wages down.
“Similarly, we have been in the forefront of campaigning that the cost of governance at all levels needs to be drastically cut to free enough resources for development.
“The hundreds of billions of naira our public office holders continue to fritter away in the name of governance is what is not sustainable,” the NLC president observed.
He added that the annual cost to the public purse of governors’ security votes, which is an unaccountable drain on public resources, translated to several thousands of minimum wages per state.
“Secondly, Nigerians who have the means to travel by air would recall that in the last six to ten years, majority, if not all our governors no longer use commercial airlines as a means of transportation.
“They now have ‘official’ aircraft and helicopters, which they maintain at huge costs to the state treasury. Their less ‘fortunate’ counterparts charter aircraft and helicopters at millions of naira to attend all manner of functions from marriages to child naming ceremonies,” he charged.
Wabba contended that the states are in the poor financial state they are in largely because of the choices their governors have made, largely on the basis of priorities they have chosen, adding that these have nothing to do with the public good.
“Workers’ salaries cannot be sacrificed on the altar of challenges of the economy which is not the making of workers.
“It has never happened in the history of our country, and it will not be said that it is during our leadership of the Nigerian labour movement that this calamity was allowed to happen to Nigerian workers,” he said.
— Nov 23, 2015 @ 14:00 GMT
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