Organized Labour and the Federal Government has yet again failed to reach a conclusion on negotiations over consequential adjustments in workers’ salaries, in lieu of the new minimum wage of N30,000.
Despite meeting for about nine hours and the consequential agreement of labour on not declaration of strike yet, no concrete agreement was reached.
The meeting began after 5:00 p.m. on Wednesday and ended at 2:00 a.m. on Thursday.
At the end of the meeting, the Minister of Labour and Employment, Dr Chris Ngige, who presided over the meeting, told journalists that specific duties had been assigned to some sub committees.
In his words the minister said: “We have agreed on areas hitherto we could not agree on. We are adjourning the meeting. We have given assignments to both parties, and they are going to do the work and get back to us”.
“The work involved is enormous, thus we are giving them the entire day to get back to us on issues of money and wage adjustment with different wage structures.
“Presently, we have 12 different wage structures in Nigeria. We don’t want to make a mistake that would be fatal thereby putting the whole exercise in jeopardy. We have all agreed that we will reconvene this meeting at 7:00 p.m. today. This will enable the sub-committees to complete the assignments and get back to us. We are okay with the meeting moving on smoothly. It is very cordial. We disagreed on various issues but we have agreed.”
These sub committees are expected to give account of these assignments or jobs before the negotiations can be deemed completed.
President of the Nigeria Labour Congress, Ayuba Wabba, who was also part of the meeting, said that Nigerians would be given details of the negotiation and concessions made after the rescheduled meeting.
He also said the report that both parties had settled for certain percentage increase in consequential adjustment was merely a speculation.
He further said that the major issues on the negotiation table were percentage increase and implementation by government.
