The would-have been 3-day warning General Strike of the Nigeria Labour Congress in demanding an implementation of the new National Minimum Wage across board appears to have come and gone, ending as an anti-climax. Representatives of organised labour reached an agreement with those of the Federal Government led by the Secretary to the Government of the Federation and former Senate President, Pius Anyim, after an earlier marathon session with the National Governors Forum.
The would-have been 3-day warning General Strike of the Nigeria Labour Congress in demanding an implementation of the new National Minimum Wage across board appears to have come and gone, ending as an anti-climax. Representatives of organised labour reached an agreement with those of the Federal Government led by the Secretary to the Government of the Federation and former Senate President, Pius Anyim, after an earlier marathon session with the National Governors Forum.
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As I write this at dawn after a sleepless night of coordination with the Joint Action Forum Secretary, Comrade Arymson, the details of the agreement are just becoming clearer. Yet, as scores of activists and Nigerian workers across the country who through calls and text messages with which they have bombarded us and rightly so over the last couple of hours can see, a lot of questions rise from the aftermath of where we now are. These questions include, in my view, but as well go far beyond the particular matter of the calling off of the “warning strike”.
What exactly is a “minimum wage”? Why the hue and cry over a minimum wage at this point in time in the country? What is the significance of the calling off of the strike and how this was done? It might be crucial to put the broader picture of the relationship between the wage system and modern industrial society in perspective, to aptly grasp the responses to these questions.
Wages as a rule, including the juiciest, cannot be just. By wages, I do not include “salaries” of representatives of capital, who as chief executive officers, directors, managers and the coterie of elected or appointed public “ministers” and “servants” also “earn” some form of monthly remuneration, in tons of naira. The wages of a worker represent his enslavement to those who control not only his labour but the product of the labour of workers past; the owners of capital. As the motto of Nigeria Labour Congress reads; “labour creates wealth”. But this wealth is appropriated by capitalists who own the means with which the labourer works to create this wealth. Since s/he has no means of production and must eat, pay; house rents, transport fares, electricity and sundry bills, in short, since s/he must live, s/he is left with no option but to earn a livelihood, that is seek for work to earn wages which represent a mere fraction of the worth of what her/his labour generates, from the employers.
With the generalisation of capitalist production in the 19th Century Europe, the exploitation of wage slaves, which basically is what we workers are, went with such brazenness that workers could see they had no choice but to combine and with their collective union strength demand and fight for the amelioration of this horrendous reality of their (working) lives. Trade unions emerged in disregard of the law, to champion their struggles. Better wages was a cardinal part of these struggles.
Social reformers and ideologies of different hues as well arose to demand, for some; fairer wages and more decent conditions. Others realised that capitalism which is the bedrock of the wage system cannot be a basis for resolving the fundamentally exploitative nature of the wage system. Not surprisingly, most of the social reformers who called for “fairer wages” were representatives of capital. Indeed quite a number of them were very wealthy man with factories who feared that with the extent of bare-faced exploitation and oppression which the workers faced, they might be pushed to the wall of revolt and considered such palliatives as they proposed necessary to dampen such possible social tsunami as could overthrow their order that such mass anger could generate.
It was such spirit and in response to the struggle of workers that a minimum wage was introduced for the first time in 1894 New Zealand as a baseline of remuneration to protect the least paid of workers who were considered the hungriest and thus the most likely candidates for being the angriest. After the Great Depression and the manipulative designs of Mr. Keynes to introduce reforms from above towards arresting revolution from below as mass unemployment, hunger and homelessness drove millions of workers onto the streets in defiance and rage, quite a number of countries in the West introduced the minimum wage. The post-War arrangement of a “class compromise” during what would be known as the “Golden Age” of capitalism lasted till the late 1960s. During this period, many more countries including some like Nigeria that had just won “flag independence” introduced and with time, institutionalised minimum wages. By 2006, according to the ILO, over 90% of all countries on the planet had some form of minimum wage or the other, on hourly, weekly or monthly basis of remuneration for workers.
In Nigeria, the history of struggle for minimum wage started as a struggle for enhanced “cost of living allowance” otherwise known as COLA. The first salvo of workers for this was in 1942, under the aegis of the civil service workers federation and was later taken up by the first Trade Union Congress which was formed in November 1942. The climax of the struggle for COLA was the historic 1945 General Strike led by the indomitable Michael Imoudu, Labour Leader Number 1. The workers won after a long drawn strike that lasted for 44 days. In 1964, the second General Strike marked an implicit struggle for and beyond minimum wage, while the result of the Adebo Commission in 1971 could be considered as the first step by the Federal Government to institutionalise minimum wage in response to the struggles of Nigerian workers. But even after that, it always took mass mobilisation and, as in 1981 when Comrade Hassan Summonu as NLC President led the 3rd General Strike in the annals of the country’s history, general strikes. The unilaterally fixed minimum wage established by the General Abdulsalam-led junta as part of the efforts of reaction to enthrone a semblance of consensus in the country to adequately roll back the six-year June 12 democratic revolution had to be fought for on a state-by-state basis by the NLC in 1999 and a similar scenario happened after the increments by the Olusegun Obasanjo administration at the turn of the decade.
The current impasse (despite the agreement reached at about midnight) on a minimum wage started almost 3 years ago. It was clear beyond all reasonable doubt that the extant minimum wage of N7,500.00 was a take home pay that could not take anybody home and even beyond those earnig the minimum wage, inflation had rendered their subsistence remuneration useless. A series of rallies was conducted across the country and two years back. A minimum wage of N52,500.00 was demanded. It has to be considered that way back in the 1980s, Prof. Ibrahim Ayagi, who is by no stretch of imagination a friend of the workers had submitted a report to the effect that a family of two parents and four children needed at least N16,000.00 to survive in the country’s leading cities. And then the exchange rate was $1 to N2. With the current exchange rate of $1 to N150, that amounts to N120,000.00 without even factoring in the depletion of real wages by inflation. Even N52,000.00 then demanded amounts to just 43.3% of Ayagi’s proposed minimum wage almost a quarter of a century back!
Organised labour bent backwards still, during the process of negotiations to accept an N18,000.00 national minimum wage, last year. The state governments were involved throughout the process of this “collective bargaining”. Interestingly a number of states, including Abia that initially proposed N25,000.00 as against the N52,500.00 was then proposed by NLC & TUC were to turn around to say they cannot afford to pay N18,000.00 minimum wage! The National Assembly which passed a resolution that organised labour should be content with N32,000.00 instead of N52,000.00 and which eventually passed the National Minimum Wage Act stipulating N18,000.00 as baseline joined the chorus of capitalist voices demanding moderation of labour when it gave a 14-day strike ultimatum instead of demanding that the state governments pay at the very least that baseline sum.
The Presidency on its part made it clear that the Act in its view affects only the “junior staffers” on GL 01-07. This of course is talking tongue-in-cheek since with the public service reforms which it initiated some six years back most of the workers on those grade levels in the public sector have been laid off through the policies of “downsizing” and “monetisation” with their menial functions contracted out to facility managers!
This was the state of affairs even after the two trade union centres gave a 14-day ultimatum to the various governments in the federation to heed their own law. The enthusiasm for an impending strike was so high in the land as the Federal and state governments skirted at addressing the workers demands. In Oyo state the workers had commenced strike a day before the national strike. Instructions had been given by the aviation industry unions to their members to shut down the country’s airspace from midnight, while the road transport workers had equally been directed by NURTW to withdraw all commercial vehicles from the road and the oil workers were to ensure a cessation of petroleum products distribution for those three days of rage that never would be, at least for now.
Ten minutes to midnight leading national television stations showed labour leaders and governors coming out of a meeting and flashed the breaking news; an agreement had been reached and the strike had been called off. The news filtered out to workers like a rumour, many would not believe even when they heard as they woke up that the strike had been called off. At strategic parts of Lagos such as Yaba, Iyana-Ipaja and Onipanu, angry young protesters went ahead to burn tyres in a frantic effort to enforce the sit-at-home that was not to be. Billows of black smoke underscored the mood of rage and defiance that set in on not a few workers and youths in the land.
The job of “industrial relations” however is not, many would say, one of making a revolution. It is all about give and take, concessions and compromises within the Webbian prism of “collective bargaining”. Thus, since most of the demands of the trade unions, it would seem were acceded to, it was only apt, perhaps for the strike to have been called off.
Two flies in the ointment though stare us in the face. Organised labour represents not only members of the unions in the formal sector. It holds the respect and ascribed leadership of the entire working people and even many from the middle classes in its hands. Labour by its historic role and strategic position not only creates wealth. It is equally the social force that alone can led society to its qualitative transformation and the eradication of exploitation. The smashing of organised labour, largely due to its own vacillations in 1994 marked the beginning of the end of the upper hand for forces of change in the six years of democratic revolution around June 12, in the country. Even “industrial relations” as a theatre of unions’ contention for workers’ interests has its political moment. At the heart of labour relations is a contestation of power which the employers never forget for even a fraction of a second, not even when they feign with actual concessions.
The second might be how the strike was called off. It might have been more apt for an agreement in principle to have been followed by an emergency session of the National Executive Council of Congress that summoned the strike. This is about “mandate seeking” and “reporting back”, even in industrial relations and especially on an issue as dicey as this. That would also have allowed for at least a one day strike to adequately warn the state governors on the readiness of labour to prosecute a struggle if again this agreement turns out to be mere empty words.
We are headed towards tumultuous times as the world is being wracked by an organic crisis of capitalism in the wake of the Great Recession. Signs of the times are what we see flashes of in the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, in the struggles for union rights in Ohio and New Jersey, in the tumultuous strikes that shook France, Portugal and Greece. This is not the time for organised labour to have a credibility deficit in the eyes of the working people and its allies on the Left of civil society. Issues regarding the minimum wage might just seem to have been resolved. The bursting out of simmering rage in the land however has only quite definitively, just been deflected at this hour.
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