The organised Labour has expressed dissatisfaction with the slow pace of implementation of the Memorandum of Understanding it signed with the Federal Government to avert its planned nationwide strike.
The state chapters of the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC and the Trade Union Congress, TUC said failure to implement the agreement before the October 30 deadline might leave them with no choice but to down tools, noting that they had commenced mobilisation of their members across the country.
The NLC Head of Information and Public Affairs, Benson Upah, urged the government to do better and faster.
The national leadership of the NLC and TUC had on October 1 reached an agreement with the Federal Government to pay N35,000 to all federal workers beginning from September pending when a new national minimum wage would be signed into law.
The resolution provided that the wage award would be paid to the federal workers for six months while states were encouraged to extend the same benefit to their workers.
The unions had threatened to declare a nationwide strike on October 3 but the move was suspended on the condition that the wage award, cash transfer, and some other resolutions must be implemented within 30 days effective from the day the MoU was signed.
Out of the 15 demands contained in the MoU, only a handful had been implemented by the government.
The Federal Government had ordered the payment of the N35,000 wage award and provision was being made for 55,000 Compressed Natural Gas conversion kits to kick-start the autogas conversion programme, while work had reportedly commenced on the construction of the state-of-the-art CNG stations nationwide, among others.
However, the Ogun State TUC Chairman, Akeem Lasisi, said that the union might be forced to declare an industrial action after the October 30 deadline if the federal and state governments failed to implement the terms of the resolutions agreed with the organised Labour.
He explained that the decision to go on strike, would depend on the outcome of the consultation meetings with other organs of the union as well as a review of the government’s efforts taken to fulfil its side of the bargain.
His NLC counterpart, Hameed Ademola, simply noted that the union would comply with any directive from its national leadership if the government failed to implement the labour demands.
