New Minimum Wage: FG, Organised Labour Postpone Meeting Till Next Tuesday

The Federal Government, Organised Labour, and the Private Sector have postponed the new minimum wage tripartite committee meeting until next Tuesday.

Naija News reports that the parties decided to postpone the meeting on Wednesday after organized labour rejected the federal government’s fresh offer of ₦57,000 minimum wage.

Recall the government increased its offer from ₦54,000 to ₦57,000 at the meeting but was rejected by the labour unions. Also, labour reduced its demand from ₦615, 000 to ₦497, 000.

However, a source privy to discussions at the meeting told Vanguard that the government team stuck to their offer of ₦57,000, and there is no sign of increasing the latest offer.

The source stated that it is a problem if the government cannot pay an appreciable salary increase, adding that the meeting has adjourned till next Tuesday.

The Labour member said the government’s offer was once again presented by the Minister of State for Labour and Employment, Nkeiruka Onyejeocha.

He said: “They are crying now. They are stuck at N57,000. There is a problem if the government cannot pay an appreciable salary increase. There is no sign that there is no money. We adjourned until next Tuesday.

“The government is insisting on N57,000, which is like wage reduction, how can you go and negotiate wage reduction because there’s nobody that is earning N57,000 now?

“We came down from N500,000 to N497,000 because when they increased by N3,000, we now came down by N3,000 too so that if they are joking, we also decided to joke, they are not the only ones who know how to joke. We came down to N497,000 when they came up to N57,000. We told them straight away that we didn’t accept the N57,000 offer.

“They pleaded with labour to accept their offer, we told them there was nothing to plead about. We told them to break down the N57,000 offer, so we will know how much they are allocating to transport, how much to accommodation, how much to health so that we know and not lump everything but they didn’t do that.”

Some of the government team members at the meeting included the Ministers of Finance, Wale Edun, and Budget, Atiku Bagudu, and Onyejeocha.

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