Union To Meet FG Over Workers’ Salaries

The Association of Senior Civil Servants of Nigeria (ASCSN) has said it had begun moves toward negotiating with the Federal Government on increase in workers’ salaries.
“The N18,000 minimum wage is grossly inadequate,” the Secretary-General of the association, Mr Alade Lawal, told newsmen in Lagos.
He said, “We have concluded our memo which we are submitting to government for increase in salary and we believe that the government will take it in good faith and negotiate with us.”
According to Lawal, the union is looking at about N75,000 as minimum wage.
“The earlier N52, 000 canvassed by Organised Labour cannot be said to be adequate in this present Nigeria.
“We knew from the start that N18,000 was not right as minimum wage because by the time the government was talking of N18,000, we were talking about N52,000 because of the rate of inflation in the country.
“At this time, we cannot even talk of N52,000 again because we are concerned about our members’ welfare and we cannot deceive ourselves to believing that the government cannot pay the N75,000,” he said.
Lawal said the union was ready to negotiate peacefully with the Federal and State governments to give the workforce “something reasonable”.
“We want to believe that reason will prevail and we can agree at something that both federal and state governments will pay.
“It will not be like the N18.000 that some state governments refused to pay,” he said.
According to Lawal, if leakages are blocked, the state governments can take care of any benchmark set as minimum wage.
He said that if the Federal Government had accepted the recommendations of the Ernest Shonekan Wage Consolidation Committee, it would have taken care of the impact of inflation on the salaries.
“The Shonekan committee had recommended that the salaries should be increased by 25 per cent for the next three years, after which it would adjust itself in accordance with the inflationary trend, but the government rejected it.
“This would have been the best approach so all this hue and cry and calling on government to come and negotiate salary increase would not arise because salaries would be adjusted according to the inflation level,” he said.
N18, 000 national minimum wage was signed into law on March 25, 2011.