The President of Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) Dr. Ajaero has disclosed that Bola Tinubu during the negotiation of a new minimum wage, gave the union an option of being paid N250,000 as minimum wage coupled with an increased price for petroleum or agreeing to be paid lesser of which they agreed to the latter.
Ajaero made this known during an interview with Arise TV on Saturday. He claimed the union settled for a minimum of N70, 000 since there wasn’t any correlation between price of petroleum products and the issue of minimum wage which they came to negotiate with Tinubu.
In his words, “Normally in Nigeria, it’s a tripartite community that demonstrates, after demonstration they came to N62,000. Organized private sector, government, governors and Labour.
“There it was Labour that said No! This can’t fly and they submitted their report to the president, awaiting transmission to the National Assembly. So at that point we said No! that this is not going to work, this is not what we agreed and then another round of talks.”
“So Thursday last week, the president met with us and gave many analysis even while we were negotiating, the governors insisted that they won’t pay that it’s going to be difficult for them to pay and then we continued moving because that has been the plan of some of them.
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He continued, “So the president gave us two options; that I can pay you N250,000 if you allow me to increase the Pump Price of Petroleum product.
“He said, ‘Ajaero, on my first day I said subsidy is gone and since that time you have refused to allow me to increase more, so where will I get the money to pay you minimum wage? If you allow me I’ll pay you that, if not take N62,000.
“I’m giving you 1 hour to talk, let me stay in my office so that we can conclude this meeting and we say no, we are not meeting here.
“We adjourned for one week and we went back and looked at the larger implication of we collecting N250,000 and another increase in pump price of petroleum products
“So we went back to Mr president and said, Mr. president these are two issues, we’re here for minimum wage , we are not here to discuss the issue of pump price or attaching it as condition to increase minimum wage. That will be too selfish of the Labour movement.
“So it was there that we opened discussion and got to N70,000 because N70,000 clearly is an increase of 130 or 133% of the old rate,” Ajaero explained.
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