As the battle for implementation of new minimum wage thickens, the Minister of Labour and Employment, Dr. Chris Ngige disclosed on Thursday that the implementation of the new minimum wage would cost the Federal Government N580 billion annually.
The labour minister said that the Federal Government would be left with no choice than to consider workers entrenchment over the minimum wage because the demand of the labour would not be sustainable.
Ngige disclosed that the focus of Buhari led administration lies on workers within the bracket of grade level step 1 and level 6 step 1 where the impact of the wage would be felt because the government can not afford the money for total implementation.
This was revealed by the Minister of labour during the courtesy visit of the leadership of United Labour Congress (ULC) ably led by its President, Joe Ajeiro.
Chris Ngige urged workers to show more understanding to the plight of the federal government and understand that the current economic realities of the country may make the new wage bill not feasible.
The government did not want to add more burden to the citizenry by sacking workers which is unavoidable and a situation the government is avoiding.
Ngige appealed to the labour to accept the consequential adjustment from levels 7 to 17, adding that the federal government had only three months left to implement the new minimum wage.
He said the government would not tell the labour leadwra what it could not pay, stating that no worker deserved to be owed salary.
The minister said: “There is no problem with disagreement in the labour system, when can sometimes disagree to later agree, on the national minimum wage, it will translate to an additional N580billion if government agrees to the consequential adjustment labour is proposing.
“Government cannot afford that kind of money now, besides the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari is more interested in the lowest cadre of workers which are those on grade level 1 step 1 and level 6 step 1, these are the ones who the N30,000 will have greater impact on.
“Government has done their own homework and brought out what they can use to defend this consequential adjustment. Grade 1 to 6 does not have any problem, but 7 to 14 band and 15 to 17 band this is where we have the problem.
“Once you finish a minimum wage and go into consequential adjustment you are trying to reach a collective bargaining agreement and once you are trying to reach and once you are the principle of ability to pay comes in.
“So if you push government to go and accede to an increment which its resources cannot accommodate, you are indirectly asking them to retrench workers so that the few that are remaining will get this big big money.
“We don’t want that, from 2015 the president has made it clear that he is not out to inflict pains on Nigerians and that he does not want to create unemployment but even at that our increase in population is galloping and our resources is not consequentialy increasing to meet up that is why we have a lot of unemployed youths on the street today.
“We need to arrive at an agreement as soon as possible so that we can use the 2019 budget allocation to deframe this consequential adjustment because it will be bad if we are unable to do it and we finish this financial year by December because the budget circle is going to return to January/December 2020 so we we have three months only before this recurrent funds as well are swept back into government treasury, that is the law.”
He regretted the inability of the joint negotiating team of both the government and labour to agree on the consequential adjustments, insisting that the new wage may become bloated by workers on grade levels 7-14 and 15-17.
Already organised labour has started mobilising their members to embark on strike on the 16th of this month.
Ajaero, in his remarks, appealed to the minister for prompt payment of the new minimum wage, stressing that the private sector must also be compelled to pay the N30, 000 wage.
He said that there was need to review obsolete laws that were not in tune with present reality, adding that a situation where some private sectors paid their employees N10,000 and N15,000 was unacceptable.