The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), on Tuesday, vowed to shut down the country for a month in protest over the National Assembly’s intentions to deregulate the national minimum wage.
The NLC’s ultimatum comes as the country waits for a new national minimum wage after months of negotiations between organised labour, the federal government, and the organised private sector.
NLC President Joe Ajaero expressed the union’s viewpoint while speaking on the sidelines of the 67th Nigeria Employers’ Consultative Association Annual General Meeting in Lagos.
Ajaero said, “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.”
The NLC president further stated that “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.
“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.”
According to the NLC president, the International Labour Organisation recognises wages as national legislation, not for sub-nationals.
The labour leader defended the fact that “every country has its own minimum wage, and some states are paying higher than the basic minimum wage, and that is the position of the law everywhere.”
However, he stated that certain people instigated by the governors were claiming that they would be unable to pay N60,000 even if their members were present at the meeting with labour, claiming that this was done in bad faith.
“We have put our members on notice that if these people succeed in coming up with such an unpatriotic and obnoxious law, In 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,” he stressed.
He went on to say that the labour movement will not accept “slave wages.”
“Every worker in Nigeria across the country is seen as a Nigerian worker, 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 the minimum wage is a lame one. If any governor is making that argument, then he doesn’t know what governance is all about,” he stated.
Ajaero emphasised that such a governor must use his capacity and acumen for the prosperity of the state.
“Governors can do better, and they should stop lamenting, because lamentation year in and year out that they can’t pay will not pay as far as there is a lot of money for them to control,” he cautioned.
Ajaero went on to explain that an ordinary family of six can live on less than N60,000 per month and still work.
He said that the NLC had presented other choices other than the minimum wage figure, which, if handled by the government prior to the elimination of oil subsidies, would have saved Nigeria from its current problems.
Meanwhile, Mr. Kingsley Chinda, the Minority Leader of the House of Representatives, stated that the National Assembly Committees on Constitutional Review are considering a proposal to move the minimum wage from the exclusive list to the concurrent legislative list.
The minority leader’s statement came in the context of the NLC president’s claim that the parliament had begun measures to decentralise the minimum wage, allowing states to pay what is convenient for them.
Speaking in Abuja on Tuesday, Chinda stated that there were different opinions and views on whether minimum wage issues should be on a concurrent or exclusive list, noting that “there is a proposal to move it to a concurrent list where states could legislate on labour matters.”
