BWARI – The Trade Union Congress (TUC) on Thursday in Bwari, FCT, urged state governments to pay the N18,000 minimum wage to workers, to promote productivity.
Mr Aliyu Musa, FCT Council Chairman of the union, made the appeal in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN).
He decried the refusal by some of the governors to pay the monthly wage.
He said that such attitude would affect workers’ welfare negatively, adding that the union would continuously resist the situation.
“As it is now, we don’t have a living wage; we only have a minimum wage, which the same state governors seem not to implement.
“If the minimum wage is taken from the exclusive list to the concurrent list, it simply means that any organisation can pay their staff what is not commensurable to them.
“Our union will continue to oppose any move that seeks to make the Nigerian worker poor and their employers more powerful.
“If workers are well paid, every other thing about the economy will take their proper shape but when organisations such as the state governments pay poorly, it will hinder productivity.”
He decried the recent bomb blast at Nyanya as a threat to workers’ welfare in the FCT.
According to him, the most important thing for the working class in the workplace is to achieve wage value and job security and not die unduly.
“We had to cancel our rally due to worry about insecurity; it is sad that with the incidence about killings resulting from bomb blast, nobody is being held accountable.
“Nobody has come out to provide answers to public questions about the root cause of the bomb blast and the possible way of finding lasting solutions to the problem,” he said. (NAN)
