The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) has issued a statement saying that it did not give any strike notice if an agreement between them and the Federal Government wasn’t reached over the implementation of the new minimum wage.
The announcement was made by the NLC General Secretary, Emmanuel Ugboaja, who explained that the statement initially made was that labour could not guarantee industrial peace if the government didn’t meet their demands after October 16, 2019.
Ugboaja stressed that labour had other ways of expressing its grievances and that strike action would only be a last resort.
Meanwhile, negotiations between the government and labour yesterday resulted in the former moving up from 11 per cent for Grade Levels (GL) 07-14 and 6.5 per cent for GL 15-17 to a new offer of 17 per cent for GL 07-09, 15 per cent for workers on GL 10-14, and 12 per cent for GL 15-17. The labour team moved from 29 per cent to 25 for GL 07-14 and 24 per cent to 20 per cent for workers on GL 15-17.
Reacting to the outcome of the meeting, Acting Head of Service, Folashade Yemi, had this to say:
We have had a very peaceful engagement. But we discovered that there are some grey areas that need to be ironed out. By the grace of God, tomorrow, discussions will continue and we believe that we will be able to get everything resolved.
