The organised labour has suspended its planned strike after the Tripartite Committee came up with a report to by submitted to the President Buhari later today.
The nationwide industrial action was initially scheduled to commence on Tuesday to press home workers’ demand for a new national minimum wage.
The President of the NLC, Ayuba Wabba, confirmed the suspension of the strike at the end of the meeting of the tripartite committee that ended around 10pm on Monday night. Wabba said the decision to suspend the action came after agreements were reached and documents signed.
“Having reached this position and agreements signed, the proposed strike action is hereby suspended,” the labour leader said.
At the end of the last meeting of the Tripartite committee made up of the Government, Labour and Organised Private Sector, the Chairperson of the committee and former Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, Ms Ama People said while the federal government insisted on N24,000, organised labour maintained its earlier stance of N30, 000.
She however said the government pleaded with labour to call off its planned strike.
“We have concluded and we have a little challenge with what we call Chapter 5 of our report, that is where we have the numbers and the figures we used for the negotiations and the figures that we concluded with and the committee has two figures: the N24, 000 suggested by the federal government and the N30, 000 given by the organized labour. “There is no stalemate. We have finished and we have signed it but we are insisting that the strike must be called off. There are still two figures, N24, 000 and N34, 000. You know that labour came up with a figure of N66, 500 but when we put all that together with the figure we got from the states…so, we put all that in a basket plus the initial figure that the federal government recommended which was N20, 700. We put them together in a basket and came up with four scenarios, we worked with one of the scenarios and that was how we agreed on that N24, 000 and N30, 000 respectively”, said Ms People.
The Federal Government team, which also included the Minister of Labour and Employment, Senator Chris Ngige, agreed to forward the report, containing the two positions of the Government and Labour to President Muhammadu Buhari by 4;15pm today.
