MINIMUM WAGE: OUR PATIENCE RUNNING OUT, NLC TELLS FG
source: http://www.eyesoflagos.com/2017/05/minimum-wage-our-patience-running-out.html

The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) yesterday told the Federal Government the patience of workers was running out on the proposed National Minimum Wage.


It demanded for announcement of membership of the Minimum wage negotiating committee.

The NLC also warned against military incursion, vowing Nigerians will resist military adventurers with everything they have.



The body asked the Chief of Army Staff to go beyond informing of the unholy interaction going on between some unnamed politicians and soldiers.

Such entities, the NLC said, should be bought to book to serve as deterrent for others.

NLC’s President, Comrade Ayuba Wabba, in a statement to mark the 2017 Democracy Day, lamented workers have waited long enough for the review of the minimum wage act.

He said: “As workers, after over six years of the last salary increment which brought the national minimum wage to N18,000, with the excruciating suffering of our members as a result of galloping inflation caused by the massive increase in the price of petrol, and the massive devaluation of the Naira, our patience has been tested to the limit.

“We therefore urge the federal government to use the occasion of the Democracy Day to announce the composition of the tripartite negotiation committee so that we can negotiate and have a living wage as minimum wage.”

On the rumored coup plot, he said: “The Nigeria Labour Congress wishes to state in the strongest possible tone that it is categorically opposed to any further military adventurism in the body politics of our nation.

“The damage military incursion into Nigeria’s political arena did over the decades when it imposed itself on the people is largely responsible for the underdevelopment of our political culture almost six decades after attaining political independence.

“The damage military rule caused our nation is not only in the realm of our political culture, it deepened and virtually institutionalised corruption in all segments of our national life.

“As some commentators have pointed to the fact that a number of our past military rulers are stupendously rich is a testimony that they indeed appropriated our commonwealth for their individual pockets at the expense of the vast majority of our people.

“We call on the Chief of Army Staff to go beyond just informing Nigerians and cautioning those trying to derail our democracy to desist from it.

” Rather, the Armed Forces should at the appropriate time after concluding its investigation, identify the individuals involved, prosecute them in the relevant courts, and if found guilty given the appropriate punishments as deterrent to potentially ambitious adventurers.”

The government should not under any circumstances increase the minimum wage. Here is a counterintuitive argument: increases of the minimum wage fuel poverty.

In a country with mass unemployment, high inflation and low productivity growth, an increase in the minimum wage: reduces demand for labour increasing unemployment; fuels consumption/import growth increasing pressure on the Naira and spurring higher inflation; and diverts scarce resources away from capital investment to recurrent expenditure in the form of higher personnel/wage costs leading to low productivity growth.

They shouldn't increase it because it might worsen the situation