Minimum Wage: FG Offers ₦2,000 Increase, Labour Counters With ₦250,000 Demand
After nearly 12 hours of negotiations, the Federal Government of Nigeria has added ₦2,000 to its proposed ₦60,000 minimum wage, while the organised labour reduced its demand from ₦494,000 to ₦250,000, according to a report by Punch Newspapers.
Recall that Neusroom had earlier reported that the tripartite committee reconvened on Friday, June 7, 2024, at the Nicon Luxury Hotel in Abuja to conclude negotiations on the long-awaited new national minimum wage.
The negotiations followed the submission of the cost implication of the minimum wage by the Minister of Finance, Wale Edun, to President Bola Tinubu.
Earlier, the Nigeria Governors Forum (NGF) expressed concerns that the proposed ₦60,000 minimum wage would lead to states allocating their entire Federal Account Allocation Committee (FAAC) funds to salaries, leaving no resources for development projects. The governors urged all parties involved to consider the socioeconomic variables and reach a sustainable agreement.
“The Nigeria Governors’ Forum agrees that a new minimum wage is due. The Forum sympathizes with labour unions in their push for higher wages. However, the Forum urges all parties to consider the fact that minimum wage negotiations also involve consequential adjustments across all cadres, including pensioners,” the statement reads in part.
The NGF cautioned that any agreement reached should be sustainable and realistic, stating that the ₦60,000 minimum wage proposal “will simply mean that many states will spend all their FAAC allocations on just paying salaries, with nothing left for development purposes. In fact, a few states will end up borrowing to pay workers every month.”
However, the leadership of Labour Unions had earlier vowed to reject any minimal increase to the ₦60,000 offer proposed by the government on the new minimum wage. The President of the TUC, Festus Osifo, reiterated this stance when he appeared on Channels TV shortly after the strike that brought the country to a standstill was called off on Tuesday.
“We told them it’s not that we’d get to the table and you start adding ₦1, ₦2, ₦3,000 as you were doing, and we got some good guarantees here and there that they would do something good,” Osifo said.
