Labour Justifies Strike, Says Nigerians Living On The Edge

The organised labour has justified its industrial action, saying Nigerians, especially workers, were living on the edge.

On May 31, the workers’ organs in the country declared a nationwide strike beginning on Monday, June 3, 2024, over the government committee’s inability to agree on a new minimum wage and reversal of the electricity tariff hike.

Both NLC and TUC said the current minimum wage of ₦30,000 could no longer cater to the well-being of an average Nigerian worker, lamenting that not all governors are paying the current wage award which expired in April 2024, five years after the Minimum Wage Act of 2019 was signed by former president Muhammadu Buhari.

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Labour said the Federal Government was offering workers “slave wage amidst excruciating hardship.” It lamented the “galloping inflation marked by unprecedented food inflation of 40% and general inflation of 33% that have left Nigerians especially workers currently living just on the edge.”

“There is no gainsaying the fact that Nigerians especially workers are currently living just on the edge,” a Monday joint statement by NLC and TUC leaders, Joe Ajaero and Festus Osifo, read.

“In addition to the historicity of slave wages marked by the continued downturn in the national economy, massive devaluation of the naira, removal of government subsidies, increase in taxation, astronomical hike of the tariff of critical utilities and the combo siege of collapsed public infrastructure and insecurity all over the country, life has become a Hobbesian reality in Nigeria – short, nasty and brutish.

“While the Federal Government offers a very paltry sum which in real inflation and naira value is far below the current national minimum wage, in one word – backward increase of the national minimum wage government has shown a huge appetite for profligacy.”