Labour turns down FG’s fresh N60,000 minimum wage offer, insists on N494,000
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NLC President Joe Ajaero
The Organised Labour, comprising the Trade Union Congress (TUC) and the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), has again turned down a fresh minimum wage proposal by the Federal Government.
The Federal Government had added a sum of N3,000 to its initially proposed N57,000 minimum wage, making it the sum of N60,000 proposed on Tuesday during a meeting of the tripartite committee on minimum wage in Abuja.
Organised labour also went down by N3,000 from its last proposal of N497,000 during the last minimum wage meeting but rejected the offer of the Federal Government to pay ₦60,000 as new minimum wage for workers.
According to the Channels Television report, a prominent member of the Tripartite Committee for the negotiation of a new minimum wage for Nigerian workers told its correspondent that the Federal Government and the Organised Private Sector (OPS) side of the talks proposed a ₦60,000 monthly minimum wage on Tuesday as against the ₦57,000 they proposed last week when the committee last met.
The government and the OPS had initially proposed ₦48,000 and ₦54,000 last week, which were also rejected by the organised labour.
The organised labour had also presented ₦615,000 as the new minimum wage but saw reasons to drop their demand to ₦497,000 last week and then to ₦494,000 on Tuesday.
Tuesday’s meeting was, however, deadlocked as talks ended without an agreement on what to pay as a new minimum wage.
The Tripartite Committee for the negotiation of a new minimum wage for Nigerian workers is yet to agree on a new minimum wage just about three days before the May 31 deadline the labour unions gave to the government to conclude the negotiations.
The labour unions said the current minimum wage of ₦30,000 can no longer cater to the wellbeing of an average Nigerian worker, lamenting that not all governors are paying the current wage award which expired in April 2024, five years after the Minimum Wage Act of 2019 was signed by former President Muhammadu Buhari. The Act should be reviewed every five years to meet up with contemporary economic demands of workers.
NLC President Joe Ajaero had described as “unsubstantial”, the fresh proposals by the government. “It is still not substantial compared to what we need to make a family moving,” the labour leader had said of the current ₦30,000 wage paid to workers in the country.
“The economy of the workers is totally destroyed. In fact, the workers don’t have any economy. I think there are two economies in the country; the economy of the bourgeoisie and the economy of the workers. I think we have to harmonise this so that we can have a meeting point,” Ajaero had said.
Sources: Channels Television and The PUNCH
