FG, Labour Union, set 8-week deadline to conclude subsidy dialogue

By Business A.M.

The federal government has sealed an agreement with the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and the Trade Union Congress (TUC) on an eight-week deadline to resolve all contentious issues and implement the resolutions arising from the demands of the organised labour.

Business A.M understands that the meeting, held on June 19, is to serve as a conclusion to earlier meetings conducted by both parties  after the organised labour threatened to go on strike, alleging that the government did not put in place measures to cushion the effect of the subsidy removal recently implemented by the President Bola Tinubu administration.

During the last meeting, the two parties set up a presidential steering committee to serve as a clearing house in coordinating the technical sub-committees on different items and demands raised by the labour union.

Commenting on the recent development, Festus Osifo, the president of TUC, disclosed that the parties would reconvene next Monday to review the framework marshalled out.
In his words: “We have concluded our meeting, if you remember very well the last time that we were here that labour, TUC, and NLC met with the government about two weeks ago, we agreed that we are going to reconvene today, that is the 19th of June, we just reconvened, we had a meeting although brief.

“The purpose of the meeting today is actually to put together the framework, what we submitted as our demand, how will they be delivered and so we are looking at that framework, the government came with what they think will work, we also made some input. From this night, we are going to continue the work in order to have that framework together.

“We agreed that anything we are putting together we are going to conclude everything in eight weeks. Everything must be rolled out within that time not something that we are going to leave endlessly. They have submitted the framework to us, we have looked at it, and we have made input to it.”

On his part, Dele Alake, the special adviser to the president on special duties, communication and strategies, said the meeting considered the short-term, medium-term and long-term measures in resolving the issue with the government.

He said: “We reconvened today, both parties went through this list and we tipped off the viable ones, those things are broken into three categories. The immediate, are those that can be of low-hanging fruit in the short term, the medium term and the long term.

“So those list of demands in terms of implementation and execution fall into those three broad categories of short, medium and long term categories. So that’s what we decided today and other meetings will still be held in order to cross the t’s and dot the i’s”

Alake explained that the steering committee and  other groups set up comprising both parties, government and labour members will work together to arrive at the final resolution of all the demands.