May Day: Imperative of treating workers right

Ahead of May Day next week, workers are demanding a country that works for all and not just for some privileged few. They stated that no matter the amount of minimum wage that is announced, if the economy is not stabilised, it amounts to nothing, writes GLORIA NWAFOR.

Before President Bola Tinubu’s inauguration on May 29, 2023, he joined forces with Nigerian workers to commemorate International Workers’ Day on May 1, where he committed to better welfare and enhanced working conditions.

In a solidarity message to mark the day, Tinubu told workers “Your fight will be my fight because I will always fight for you. In me, you will find a dependable ally and co-labourer in the fight for social and economic justice for all Nigerians, including all the working people.

“My plans for better welfare and working conditions are clearly spelt out in my Renewed Hope Agenda for a Better Nigeria. It is a covenant born of conviction and one I am prepared to keep.

Almost one year down the line, organised labour has called for four industrial actions with back-and-forth tactics with the current administration.
The reason was to protest the rising cost of living in the country and the seeming inaction of the Federal Government in the face of the people’s predicament.

Since Tinubu announced his raft of economic reforms, many workers, even at the state level, have been clamouring for comprehensive policies to cushion the associated shocks.

The policies of subsidy removal and naira floatation, the workers said, are both excellent policies, but they have yet to be well implemented. According to them, both have left workers impoverished and disoriented.

Currently, Nigeria’s food inflation in March 2024, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), reached 40.01 per cent year-on-year, marking an increase of 15.56 percentage points from 24.45 per cent in March 2023, while the inflation rate also increased to 33.2 per cent in the same month.

According to the NBS, inflation in March was driven by an increase in food and beverages coupled with energy and housing costs.

Noting that Nigerian workers are between a rock and a hard place, experts say workers are not to blame for the country’s situation amid decades of corruption and wasteful government spending during economic booms.

Director of Public Policy Initiatives at the Shehu Musa Yar’Adua Foundation, Amara Nwankpa, said that there is a cost to that kind of governance that does not look to avert long-term pain, saying that the government may have missed the window for introducing safety nets as it has squandered years of booms.

She said the government needed to go for the low-hanging fruit that can target the vulnerable and the most affected in the country like food and other sources of energy that can have an immediate impact.

Ahead of May Day, workers told The Guardian that the day is only to celebrate their resilience as Nigerian workers, asking the government for new thinking on the imperative of treating workers better.

They said they needed to celebrate that despite the deficits in their employment conditions, they are still standing and creating the wealth that has kept the economy going. According to them, the government has fared badly on workers’ issues.

With the hope that President Tinubu would announce a new wage on Workers’ Day, because April 19, 2024, made it exactly five years since the N30,000 Minimum Wage Act was signed into law, making it come into expiration.

They said they had expected that before now, the tripartite committee negotiating for the new national minimum wage would have finished negotiations and agreements reached on all the major issues and then the reports would have gone back to the president, who will now fashion out an executive bill and do an onward transmission to the National Assembly to enact into law.

Assistant General Secretary, Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Chris Onyeka, said the government should have a new thinking on the imperative of giving workers value according to the premium they deserve.

For instance, on the issue of the minimum wage, he said the country does not need to take months to negotiate it. He noted that announcing a new minimum wage is not charity to workers but something that needed to be done for the nation to make a profit.

According to him, the way you treat workers determines the nature of the development of every society “and that is the expectation that we should be recognised and treated within the context of that recognition, meaning you take care of us, our wages can take us home, by taking care of our basic needs like housing, clothing, food, transportation and all that makes us humans.”

Noting that there are safeguards to the parameters of the 2019 Minimum Wage Act, following its expiration, he said the president cannot just announce anything unilaterally on his own.

“It is a tripartite process and whatever is going to be announced is going to be the result of the outcome of the tripartite process. Since that has not happened as the minimum wage committee is still meeting and discussing, the president cannot go against the tenets of social dialogue.

“But if he goes and announces any increment in wages, we will accept that but that is not going to stop the minimum wage negotiating committee from announcing its own.

“The president’s announcement would be an addition to what was raised by the committee. It is a bonus for us, nothing stops him. Nothing stops an employer from increasing the salaries of his employees by some percentage,” he said.

Similarly, Head of Information and Public Affairs, NLC, Benson Upah, lamented that the government has not been able to keep to its promises.

He said the two Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) of June 5 and Oct 2, 2023, the terms and conditions have largely been observed in the breach by the government and have thus left a huge trust deficit.

Given the scenario, he said he does not expect anything much from the government on Workers’ Day.

“We do not want to indulge in self-illusion but that is no license for government to do nothing, “he said.

Asking if he expects the government to announce a new wage on the day as speculated, he said: “For minimum wage, there is an established procedure for arriving at a mutually acceptable wage. If the process is speeded up before May Day and he announces, it is fine. But if not concluded before then, I do not see how the president can by fiat announce a minimum wage.

“The committee is made of critical stakeholders from government, employers and labour, whereby the process of arriving at a figure is quite meticulous. A lot of debates, analysis and statistical data would come into play.”

Secretary General of the Trade Union Congress of Nigeria (TUC), Lagos State Council, Abiodun Aladetan, said since workers would be hopeful of good news on their day, the economic policies of the governments have always targeted workers who are fixed-income earners with neo-liberal policies.

He said it was sad that while the policies always consume disposable income available to workers, the current battle is just to afford food, while other necessities have become luxuries for workers also.

While many households have collapsed due to insufficient income, Aladetan said workers have been humbled by the abundant lack orchestrated by the political class, adding that the self-confidence of the citizens is gradually being eroded, “if not completely diminished, because we have successfully built a society that favours the haves while simultaneously tearing down the have-nots. As we speak, the livelihood of workers has been destroyed.

“It is a sad reality that we do not have the middle class anymore. What we now have is the rich class densely populated by the political class and their cohorts, and the poorest of the poor, which is the exclusive preserve of the working people.

“We all must also be courageous enough to speak truth to power to help to build a better Nigeria and not to tear it apart,” he said.

National President of the Food, Beverage and Tobacco Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (FOBTOB), Jimoh Oyibo, who lamented the challenges the food sector is going through, said if the economy is not working, the salary increase will amount to nothing.

He said what the country needed at this time was to see the economy working, particularly, the agricultural sector.

Workers in the informal sector lend their voices, saying that the Tinubu-led administration must take Nigerians more seriously.

Noting the sector has many underlying issues largely unaddressed, the workers said the sector has lost millions while businesses are collapsing without any systematic form of assistance.

General Secretary of Federation of Informal Workers’ Organisation of Nigeria (FIWON), Gbenga Komolafe, said that thousands of workers displaced in the real sector over the closure of factories or relocation of businesses by multinationals will end up in the informal sector because the workers must survive first before gaining back their feet.

The move, Komolafe said is further choking the already gloated market.

Noting that the sector has no expectations from the government ahead of May Day, rather, he urged that this administration take them more seriously, demanding that they bring up policies that will impact positively on the economy.

“We have no expectations because we can’t see anything coming from them in any coherent manner to address the issues.

“The informal sector should receive better attention. We are not medium-scale businesses that employ up to 50 persons. These are family businesses and self-employed people who are over 90 per cent in the country. There is nothing completely addressing their needs and survival at this time,” he said.

On the issue of palliatives and how billions have gone down the drain due to mismanagement by appointed officers without getting to the targeted audience, the FIWON chief, said: “We have called that appointing ministers to supervise the disbursement of money bureaucratically has never worked, they have always stolen the money. For a change, let the government involve the organisation of working people themselves, it will ensure transparency. But by doing this in a manner that is not open, we don’t know the beneficiaries and how many they are. You just tell us billions have been disbursed. To who? At the end of the day, nobody will come out to say I am one of the beneficiaries. That has been the problem. They have been enmeshed in unprecedented levels of fraud in the name of the working poor.”