The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Enugu State Council has given Enugu State government till the end of January 2022 to accommodate state agencies and local government workers in the implementation of minimum wage or face indefinite industrial action
The Chairman of the NLC in the state, Virginus Nwobodo disclosed this in Enugu recently while briefing journalists on the activities of the union so far.
Nwobodo said the NLC was surprised that two years after the state government announced the implementation of the new wage, the same government had failed to pay all the civil servants in the state.
However, only workers in the core state government ministries are currently being paid while their colleagues in government agencies, departments, and Local governments are not being paid.
Nwobodo said that the council had for long made entreaties to the state government to ensure the full implementation of the minimum wage across all sectors of the state’s workforce.
According to him, workers in the parastatal, agencies, and local governments are the core service providers and there is no reason to deny them the minimum wage.
“We have informed the state government that these classes of workers have waited for too long to be paid, therefore, if the state government fails to pay them from this January, we would no longer guarantee industrial harmony in the state. We will mobilize our members for industrial action to press home the demand,” he said.
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He further said that any state governor that had not fully implemented the payment of the new wage was not worker-friendly.
“Why pay political appointees huge sums but cannot pay the minimum wage? It means that they lack the political will to pay,” he said.
On the state’s silence toward the implementation of the minimum wage at the local government level, he said that though the local government system had its peculiar challenges, pointing out that all civil servants must be paid. The local government system must be fully looked at because it affected public school teachers and as such he said was unacceptable.
The local government was dragging its feet on the mode of payment but we are insisting that they must apply the chart used to pay those at the state level.
He said that the government had earlier been issued with a three-day warning strike notice which had elapsed and that the state chapter of the NLC has not relented to see that all workers in the state are paid the new wage.
