The Organized Labour, on Monday night, agreed to suspend its 30-day indefinite strike planned to start on Tuesday. The resolution followed over five hours of deliberations between the Federal Government and Labour Unions at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.
Minister of Labour and Employment, Simon Lalong, while announcing the outcome of the meeting said, “The NLC and TUC accept to suspend for 30 days the planned Indefinite Nationwide strike scheduled to begin, Tuesday, the 3rd of October, 2023.” The NLC President, Joe Ajaero, however, said the unions would revisit the agreement if the FG failed to fulfil their demands.
According to the agreement, the Federal Government will grant a wage award of N35,000 only to all Federal Government workers “beginning from the month of September pending when a new national minimum wage is expected to have been signed into law.”
The agreement further read in part, “A minimum wage committee shall be inaugurated within one month from the date of this agreement.
“Federal Government accepts to vote N100 billion for the provision of high capacity CNG buses for mass transit in Nigeria. Provisions are also being made for initial 55,000 CNG conversion kits to kick start an auto gas conversion programme, whilst work is ongoing on state-of-the-art CNG stations nationwide. The rollout aims to commence by November with pilots across 10 campuses nationwide.
“The Federal Government should urge state government through the National Economic Council and Governors Forum to implement wage award for their workers. Similar consideration should also be given to local government and private sector workers. A joint visitation will be made to the refineries to ascertain their rehabilitation status.”
In the meantime, the Federal Government on Sunday announced that the provisional wage increase announced by President Bola Tinubu for all low-income workers for six months would cut across all treasury-paid workers.
This compromise was reached to prevent the proposed indefinite nationwide strike declared by the organised labour.
The meeting came hours after the President announced the approval of a N25,000 provisional wage increase for a category of federal workers for the next six months. This N25,000 provisional wage increment was however rejected by labour leaders, resulting in the Federal Government raising the amount to N35,000.
1.5 million federal workers are now set to benefit from the proposed N35,000 monthly palliative for a period of six months. Considering this, the Federal Government is expected to spend N52.5bn monthly on 1.5 million federal workers, totalling N315bn to be spent in six months, with each civil servant getting a total of N210,000.
Join our twitter community :