The Trade Union Congress, TUC, yesterday said they will not join the strike call by the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC).
The senior workers umbrella organisation decided at its National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting yesterday in Abuja that it would continue with dialogue with the government to ease the pain of petrol subsidy removal, a senior figure told our correspondent.
The NLC had on Friday announced that workers will go on a two-day warning strike, tomorrow and Wednesday.
Its President Joe Ajaero said the decision was taken at its NEC meeting with possibility of a “total shutdown” after 14 days.
The TUC source, who is a NEC member said the union reasoned that the planned strike is “premature”.
“The TUC is not joining the NLC on that planned warning strike. The reason is because we are reaching out to the Federal Government. The government has already released palliatives to the states and we are also expecting the government to release the one for federal workers.”
“When we met with the Senate, the statement by the NLC that they don’t have confidence in the Chief of Staff to the President-led committee led to the suspension of that committee because the man (Femi Gbajabiamila) felt if the NLC doesn’t have confidence in him why should he be leading the committee when the outcome will not be palatable? That stalled the work of the committee .
“Now, there is a Minister of Labour and Employment (Simon Lalong), who is supposed to be the leader of the government team. There is an ongoing effort to interact with us to get results.
”We feel that it is not the right time to go on strike. When you go on strike we will be putting the masses at the receiving end because the government has a way of navigating out of such matters.
Again, the issue of strike should not be one-sided. It should be a joint effort by the two labour centres to agree before issuing a strike notice. One centre cannot claim superiority over the other centre. It is not done anywhere.
“You cannot announce a strike and then decide to bring us in. It is supposed to be a decision taken by the two centres.
”The NLC is free to go on strike on its own. We are different unions.”
The NLC president could not be reached last night to confirm if it was on the same page with the TUC over the proposed warning protest. He neither picked telephone calls nor responded to a text message sent to him.
