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By Madu Obi
The organized labour has threatened to resume the suspended strike if the federal government and the national assembly fail to act on its ₦250,000 minimum wage demand by Tuesday, 11th June, 2024.
The Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, and the Trade Union Congress, TUC, organs have scheduled a meeting to decide on the resumption of the nationwide strike relaxed last week.
According to the organized labour, the one-week grace period given to the federal government last Tuesday, June 4, 2024, would expire by the midnight of Tuesday, June 11, 2024.
An Assistant General Secretary of NLC, Chris Onyeka, said on Channels Television that it is the federal government and national assembly that now have the call and not the organized labour.
"Our demand is there for them (the government) to look at and send an Executive Bill to the national assembly, and for the national assembly to look at what we have demanded, the various facts of the law, and then come up with a national minimum wage Act that meets our demands.
If that does not meet our demand, we have given the federal government a one-week notice to look at the issues and that one week expires tomorrow (Tuesday). If, after tomorrow, we have not seen any tangible response from the government, the organs of the organized labour will meet to decide on what next to do,” he said.
On what labour would do should the government insist on ₦62,000, Onyeka added: “It was clear what we said. We said we are relaxing a nationwide indefinite strike. It’s like putting a pause on it. So, if you put a pause on something and if organs that govern us as trade unions decide that we should remove that pause, it means that we go back to what was in existence before.”
He insisted that labour would not accept ₦62,000 or ₦100,000, which he described as 'starvation wage' for Nigerian workers, stressing that the ₦250,000 labour’s latest demand at the last meeting of the tripartite committee on minimum wage last Friday, is the living wage for an average Nigerian worker.
“We have never considered accepting ₦62,000 or any other wage that is below what we know is able to take Nigerian workers home. We will not negotiate a starvation wage.
We have never contemplated ₦100,000 let alone of ₦62,000. We are still at ₦250,000, that is where we are, and that is what we considered enough concession to the government and the other social partners in this particular situation.
"We are not just driven by frivolities, but the realities of the market place; realities of things we buy every day: bag of rice, yam, garri, and all of that.”, he added.
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