Minimum wage: Unions want to resume suspended strike

By Ayodele Oni

TThe Organised Labour Union may resume its indefinite strike on Tuesday, which it suspended last week, but it has insisted that it will not accept a “starvation wage” of 62,000 or 100,000 naira as minimum wage for workers.

The union stuck to its demand of 250,000 naira, which it last asked for at the last meeting of the Tripartite Committee on Minimum Wage on Friday, as a living wage for an average Nigerian worker.

Chris Onyeka, deputy secretary general of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), made this clarification while answering questions on Channels Television’s “The Morning Brief” on Monday.

Onyeka pointed out that the one-week deadline given to the Federal Government last Tuesday to suspend the strike will expire at midnight on Tuesday, June 11, 2024.

If the federal government and the National Assembly do not meet the workers’ demands by Tuesday, the NLC and Trade Union Congress (TUC) bodies will meet to decide on the resumption of nationwide industrial action, he said.

“We have never thought about 100,000 naira, let alone 62,000 naira. We are still at 250,000 naira, that is our position and that is, in our view, a sufficient concession to the government and the other social partners in this particular situation.”

“We are not just driven by frivolities, but by the realities of the market; the realities of the things we buy every day, bags of rice, yams, garri and all that.

“Now it is the turn of the federal government and the National Assembly. It is not our job. We demand that they look at a draft law and send it to the National Assembly. And that the National Assembly examines our demands, the various facts of the law, and then passes a national minimum law that meets our demands.”

“If this does not meet our demands, we have given the federal government a one-week deadline to examine the matter, which expires on Tuesday.

“If we do not see a concrete response from the government after tomorrow, the union bodies will meet to decide on how to proceed.

“What we said was clear. We said we were relaxing a nationwide, indefinite strike. It’s like we’re putting it on hold.”