THE President of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Comrade Ayuba Wabba, on Wednesday asked the federal government to adopt a National Employment Plan that would engender decent work in Nigeria.
Comrade Wabba made the call at a Decent Work Round-Table discussion organised to mark the 2021 World Day for Decent Work (WDDW) which is commemorated every October 7 since 2008.
The Decent Work Round-Table discussion held under the theme; “The Effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Health, Employment, Income and Gender Equality are more entrenched and catastrophic than before.”
The NLC said that the national employment plan was imperative to address the issues of peace and stability in the country, adding that the government at all levels should take serious action and put in place mechanisms that would engender decent work in Nigeria.
While noting that 70% of Nigerians earn their livelihood in the informal sector, Comrade Wabba also identified casualisation of workers as a major challenge to the pursuit of decent work agenda.
“In fact, permanent jobs on daily basis are converted to casuals. Causals mean those workers that have no social protection, no rights and in most cases, most labour standards are undermined. I must use this opportunity to call on our government at all levels to adopt a national employment plan and I think decent employment is a recipe for addressing the issue of peace and stability.
“We have many of our youth, both trained and untrained, looking for jobs and the jobs are not there. These youths can certainly be tools in the hands of people who are manipulative and this can be very dangerous to the society. As a country, unemployment must come to the centre stage in our recovery for COVID-19 plan,” Wabba said.
The NLC President said Nigeria should begin to engage the process of achieving Sustainable Development Goal 8.7, which is provision of decent jobs for the teeming youth by 2030. He said this will further reduce informality in our system by more than half.
“We need jobs that respect maximum working hours and jobs that can provide a decent minimum wage. Today, we know that the 30,000 minimum wage has been reduced to virtually nothing due to external effects of inflation in our system. We also need jobs that respect fundamental labour status, we need jobs that are sustainable,” he added
The Country Director of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) to Nigeria, Vanessa Phala, called on trade unions to stand for decent work. She said decent work must be at the centre of government action to bring back economic growth and building of a new global economy that puts people first.
She said recent statistics from the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) indicate that over 200 million jobs were lost to Covid-19, adding that another 100 million workers were at risk of job losses.
“In Nigeria, the Covid-19 pandemic has deepened the crises in certain sectors of the economy such as the banking, manufacturing, services, health, education, among others. This is with unprecedented high level of unemployment at over 30% and over 70% of the total workforce in the informal economy,” she said.
