The Nigeria Labour Congress threatened to shut down the nation for a month on Tuesday in protest of the National Assembly’s intentions to deregulate the national minimum wage, following months of discussions between organised labour, the federal government, and the organised private sector.
Speaking on the fringes of the 67th Nigeria Employers’ Consultative Association Annual General Meeting in Lagos, NLC President Joe Ajaero stated that “As we are here, a Joint Committee of the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the Judiciary are meeting. They have decided to remove section 34 from the Exclusive legislative list to the concurrent list so that the state governors can determine what to pay you and so that there will be no minimum wage again. You cannot decide what you should earn.”
“The very moment the House of Representatives and the Senate come up with such a law that will not benefit Nigerian workers, they will be their drivers and gatemen, and there will be no movement for one month. We cannot accept any situation where the governors and the National Assembly members will foist a slave wage on workers and force poverty on the citizens. Organised Labour will not accept it.”
“We don’t have a situation where people determine their wages that amounts to some level of illegality. In the constitution, there is a provision for equal work for equal pay. If we go into job analysis and job evaluation, we may discover that a clerk here may be doing the same work as the clerk in Sokoto.
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“The so-called decentralisation of wages to pay somebody here less than what the other person is receiving is against the concept of equity and equality before the law.”
The International Labour Organisation acknowledges wage as a national law, according to the president of the NLC. “Every nation has a minimum wage, and some states pay more than the basic minimum wage, and that is the position of the law everywhere,” he asserted.
But, he added, certain individuals who were influenced by the governors were claiming that they would not be able to pay N60,000, even if their members were present at the meeting with labour, and that this was being done sadly.
“We have put our members on notice that if these people succeed in coming up with such unpatriotic and obnoxious law. This democracy they are playing with, we have enough in this country in terms of hardship. Some people, based on their privileged positions want to inflict more Injuries on the workers and citizens of this country and that will not be accepted, the labour movement will not accept “slave wages” he stressed.
“Every worker in Nigeria across the country is seen as Nigerian workers and any attempt to discredit them in a federation will first be resisted by the NLC.
“There is no governor that is not receiving the same thing nationwide, they are not receiving according to their revenue in their states, but they want that of the workers to be so. So, the issue of using revenue as a basis for the payment of minimum wage is a lame one. If any governor is making that argument, then he doesn’t know what governance is all about.”
Ajaero, who went on to argue that an average family of six lives on less than N60,000 per month and still works, claimed that the NLC had proposed many options other than the minimum wage, which if addressed by the government long before the removal of oil subsidies, would have saved Nigeria from the current challenges.
