Since the federal government signed the wage bill into law
in the year 2009 there has been a centralized wage structure for the civil
service of the federation. The federal government had continually urged states
to improve their salary structure so as to meet the new minimum wage.
In this write-up the minimum wage refers to the amount of
#18000 that is minimum salary a worker in the Nigerian civil service is
expected to be paid either at the state or federal level.
As with Nigeria where a lot of things goes wrong, since the
signing of this bill into law only a small number of the states have actually
complied with this legislation. In a country where the official price
of kerosene is #50 per litre and possibly only the president’s wife could get
the commodity at that price while kerosene regularly sells for between #100 to
#200per litre, you should not be too surprised. The state are not
exactly too much at fault as most of them cannot possibly pay their workers at
that price. This then brings to our mind a question we’ll like to ask:
·
Why did the federal government agree on a minimum
wage when it knew that individual state would clearly not be able to
pay.(considering that this has cost the states billions of naira in respect of
industrial actions from the workers that try to demand the implementation of
the minimum wage as they view this as their entitlement)
To correct this initial mistake the government at the centre
is looking to pass into law another bill that would allow the states to
negotiate the terms of pay with their workers on their own terms.
There are many plausible reasons why intellectuals would
support the deregulation of the minimum wage, the first being that all states
of the federation do not have equal financial capabilities and so for instance
it might be possible for Lagos or Rivers to pay #18000 minimum wage other
poorer states might not be able to pay. In Nigeria most states depend on the
federal allocation to survive and the quota for sharing federal allocation in
Nigeria doesn’t favour the weak states. Rather it’s the richest states that get
more share of the money.
Another reason is not far-fetched as we have witness times
without number, the fact that there is a set minimum wage actually impoverishes
the poor states as the civil servants in the states usually embark on
industrial actions to demand that their state government increase their salary
to meet up with the ‘’minimum wage’’ and making the states lose precious money
to Industrial actions.
But is that all there is to the argument? On the other side
there are those of the view that the minimum wage is the only thing helps to
regulate and check the activities of governors that might try to take advantage
of its civil servants. Since corruption is so widespread in Nigeria it won’t be
hard to find states governors that would do just that if the minimum wage is
deregulated.
Another side of the coin is that it might reduce the power
of the labour unions. It would surely reduce the power of unions in the country
to collectively bargain for things from the government as there would be so
much disparity among the pay of the labour force across the country.
In the middle of all these talk to deregulate the minimum
wage, we must look for alternatives. One of such is to try to reduce disparity
among the federal allocation shared to the states or better still the money
should be shared while paying regard to population of each state as the money
is the ultimate make or break for the states to determine if they can afford to
pay the minimum wage or not.
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