Labour Suspends Strike For 30 Days
The Federal Government may incur additional N315bn in wage bill in the next six months for the newly introduced allowance for federal workers.
This came as Organised Labour agreed to suspend its proposed nationwide strike for 30 days, following the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding with the Federal Government after a marathon meeting that ended around 11pm on Tuesday.
The resolution followed over five hours of deliberations between the Federal Government and Labour at the Chief of Staff Conference Room of the Presidential Villa, Abuja.
Announcing the outcome of the meeting to State House correspondents, the Minister of Labour and Employment, Simon Lalong, 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.”
Lalong said the memorandum shall be filed with the relevant court of competent jurisdiction within one week as consent judgment by the Federal Government.
However, the NLC President, Joe Ajaero, said the unions would revisit the agreement if the FG failed to fulfil their demands.
According to the agreement, the Federal Government grants 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.”
This likely means that 1.5 million federal workers will benefit from the proposed N35,000 monthly palliative proposed by the Federal Government to cushion the effects of the removal of subsidy on the Premium Motor Spirit, popularly known as petrol, for a period of six months.
The Federal Government is expected to spend N52.5bn monthly on 1.5 million federal workers.
This means that a total of N315bn will be spent in six months, with each civil servant getting a total of N210,000.
The President General of the Maritime Workers Union of Nigeria, Adewale Adeyanju on Monday, directed that all members of the union to resume work on Tuesday (today) instructed by the Nigeria Labour Congress.
However, many people of working-class age will not benefit from this Federal Government’s new allowance (N35,000)
About 88.2 per cent of working-age Nigerians have no salary-paying jobs.
Data from the National Bureau of Statistics showed that only about 11.8 per cent of working-age Nigerians were engaged in wage employment in the first quarter of 2023.
According to the asksource.info site, wage employment includes any salaried or paid job under contract (written or not) to another person, organisation, or enterprise in both the formal and informal economies.
The NBS also disclosed that there was a decrease of 1.6 percentage points in the percentage for wage employment from 13.4 per cent in Q4 2022 to 11.8 per cent in Q1 2023.
The Nigeria Labour Force Survey (4th Quarter 2022 and 1st Quarter 2023) report by the NBS read, “The share of wage employment was 13.4 per cent in Q4 2022 and 11.8 per cent in Q1 2023.”
It means that 1.6 per cent of working-age Nigerians either resigned or lost their salary-paying jobs between Q4 2022 and Q1 2023.
However, the NBS did not provide a value for the total number of working-age Nigerians, unlike in its previous report.
In 2020, the NBS placed Nigeria’s working-age population at 122 million.
