After hours of meeting on Friday, the Federal Government and private sector stakeholders increased their proposed minimum wage to N62,000, a slight raise from their previous offer of N60,000. However, labor unions have scaled back their demand to N250,000, down from their initial request of N494,000.
This development marks the conclusion of the tripartite committee’s deliberations on the new minimum wage, bringing an end to months of negotiations between the Federal Government, organized private sector, and labour unions.
The proposed minimum wage will be presented to President Bola Tinubu, who is expected to send a bill to the National Assembly for ratification, paving the way for the new wage to become law.
With the work of the tripartite committee which was constituted in January this year coming to an end, the ball now shifts to the table of President Tinubu and subsequently that of the National Assembly.
Though both labour, the organised private sector and the Federal Government had agreed that the current minimum wage of N30,000 is no longer sustainable with the present economic reality of the country, agreeing a figure for the new minimum wage had for long proved difficult.
While the government and the organised private sector viewed labour’s proposed N494,000 as over the roof, labour felt the offer of N60,000 was not considerate.
At the expiration of an ultimatum issued by labour on May 31, the unions embarked on strike on June 3, shutting down businesses across the nation.
The action was however suspended on Tuesday after the Federal Government promised to increase the minimum wage to an amount bigger than N60,000 as they resumed negotiations.
The suspension of the strike gave room for the resumption of negotiations which continued until this night.
We won’t accept meagre addition to N60,000
With the government and the organised private sector just adding N2,000 to the earlier N60,000 rejected by labour, it is left to be seen if the new proposal will be accepted after the workers earlier vowed not to accept any lean addition by the government.
The President of the Trade Union Congress (TUC), Festus Osifo, stated this on Channels Television’s Politics Today programme on Tuesday, hours after the Organised Labour comprising the TUC and the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) suspended its industrial action which started at 12:01 am on Monday.
“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,” Osifo said.
When asked whether Labour would accept a few thousand naira additions to the last offer of the tripartite committee, 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.”
