Organised labour in Ogun has threatened a full-blown strike following the state government’s failure to accede to their demands.
The state chairman, Nigeria Labour Congress, Emmanuel Bankole, made this known while interacting with members of the Labour Writers Association of Nigeria at a workshop held in Abeokuta on Sunday.
Mr Bankole said the final decision at the workers’ parliament, which would hold on June 27, would determine the scope of the intended strike.
‘’Where we are currently is that the workers have been pushed to the wall; there are procedures when we want to go on strike, and we have taken the pain to go through all that.
‘’We have gone beyond promises: that is where we are now,” he said.
According to him, some of the demands include the remittance of 21 months of salary deductions and the implementation of the Contributory Pension Scheme.
Others are payment of eight years of leave allowances, restoration of payment of gross salary and the implementation of Consequential Adjustment on Minimum Pension.
‘’On the issue of pensioners, statutory by the constitution of the Federal Republic, whenever there is wage review, minimum pension is also supposed to be reviewed, but as we speak, that has not been done.
‘’As we speak, some of those pensioners take as low as N5,000 as pension; you can imagine in that old age, even their drugs they buy monthly, some of those drugs are more than N5,000.
‘’We also have accumulated gratuity; we engaged the government, and it started paying N500 million every quarter, which is grossly inadequate, bearing in mind the number of people they need to pay.
‘’So, we are saying that the government needs to upwardly review that quarterly payment, increase it so that a good number of people can receive this money while they are still alive,‘’ Mr Bankole said.
(NAN)
