Minimum Wage:
The
Vice President, Nigeria Labour Congress, Isa Aremu, on Thursday informed the
Senate that it had lost the confidence of Nigerian workers following its
decision to move minimum wages issues from exclusive list to concurrent list.
“This ammendment by the Senate is
done in bad faith, is an abuse of trust and the Senate has to do as much as
possible to regain the confidence of Nigerians and Nigerian workers in
particular,” Aremu said, while on Sunrise Daily.
The issue which had been debated for about a year had prompted the
Congress to protest on September 19th, 2013 and according to Aremu, “the House
of Reps understood the need to retain labour issues including minimum wage on
the exclusive list of the constitution; But it was the Senate that was trying
to push labour push to the concurrent list.”
He further recalled that Senate President David Mark had at the time
assured the Congress that it was “better informed about labour position” which
was that “labour issues should be retained on the exclusive list of our
constitution, just as it has been since 1963 down to 1979, for obvious
reasons”.
He noted that “labour is a factor of production and if you want to
motivate labour for development, you must give them certain minimum environment
to operate”, insisting that “minimum wage, minimum hours of work, minimum
safety conditions in the work place regardless of whether workers are from
private sector or public sector, or State or Federal”.
He emphasised that the Congress was insisting on a minimum wage system
because “some employers will pay miserable pay” if such was not in place.
“If you don’t have minimum wage in place, some employers, especially
private sector (here we are talking of some Asian employers)- they will pay
graduates, whether they are polytechnic or university graduates – N5,000.
“I think the whole idea is you must have minimum floor below which no
worker will earn and the same thing applies for minimum hours of work.”
He highlighted that such was the tradition in several countries signed
to ILO conventions
Aremu also claimed that governors who were pressurizing the lawmakers
were self-serving and ill-informed.
“These governors who don’t want to pay 18,000 minimum wage, they are
the ones using private jets. They even have private terminals now, for
themselves.
“Also, the same governors have minimum pay for themselves” he said,
noting that the same applied to senators.
“There’s a minimum pay for all of them so why do you want to apply this
double standard to the working people. I think it’s ill-informed. It’s an abuse
of trust and I hope the Senate will be able to reverse its position”.
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