The Nigerian Labour Union comprising the Trade Union Congress (TUC) and the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), has vowed to reject any lean addition to the ₦60,000 offer by the tripartite committee on the new minimum wage.
This was made known by the President of TUC, Festus Osifo, during an interview with Channels Television’s Politics Today programme on Tuesday, hours after the Organised Labour suspended its industrial action which started at 12:01 am on Monday.
Osibi said, “At the meeting on Friday, they (the tripartite committee) said they would not add anything more to the ₦60,000 but in the meeting of yesterday (Monday), Mr President was able to commit to doing what is more than ₦60,000.”
When asked if a few thousand naira additions to the proposed N60,000 would be accepted, the TUC boss said, “No, we also told them that it’s not that we’d get to the table and you start adding ₦1, ₦2, ₦3,000 as you were doing and we got some good guarantees here and there that they would do something good.”
Osifo said the Organised Labour is not fixated on ₦494,000 as the new minimum wage for workers in the country but the tripartite committee must show seriousness and offer workers something economically realistic in tandem with current inflationary pressures.
Though the union leader refused to mention a specific amount, he said the new minimum wage must be equal in purchasing power to the value of ₦30,000 in 2019 and ₦18,000 in 2014.
