Delayed salaries as theft of wages
How do leaders serve their people? They may pay good wages and treat employees with respect.John C. Maxwell With open unemployment rate of almost 50 per cent, few workers who have jobs are privileged in Nigeria in recent times. Mass workers of the old good working Nigeria have long been endangered, no thanks to downsizing […]
How do leaders serve their people? They may pay good wages and treat employees with respect.
John C. Maxwell
With open unemployment rate of almost 50 per cent, few workers who have jobs are privileged in Nigeria in recent times. Mass workers of the old good working Nigeria have long been endangered, no thanks to downsizing in the public sector and collapse of hundreds of industries in the private sector. Mass unemployment is bad enough. But even worse too is the fact that few available jobs are getting precarious. Many workers are outsourced. Many are casuals who are get hired and fired at the will by profit-driven employers. Few workers are permanent employees with pensionable jobs. The old slave masters at least kept slaves permanently. Some modern employers simply rent workers. Even more unacceptable is the fact that increasingly some workers are denied adequate wages and paid irregularly and even not paid at all.
It is the truism of working life that working people work in order to earn money pay for food, housing and school fees among others. Yet, increasingly in Nigeria, access to adequate and regular wages is no longer guaranteed contrary to the spirit and content of the Constitution and the country’s labour laws. In many states of the Federation as well as many Federal ministries as well as MDAs, non-payment of wages has led to huge wage arrears. In some cases, such as Benue state, Governor Gabriel Suswam true to 18th century trans Atlantic slave master said he could not pay salaries running up to three months. Large wage arrears have been rightly linkened to debt bondage and slavery.
The point cannot be overstated that delayed payment of salaries of working men and women is wage theft. It is an economic crime. Some of the employers in the public sectors are Governors who are also politicians. They actually just recently duly paid all their delegates for their respective political parties’ Conventions from which some serving governors are also senators in waiting. Who paid their indulgent bills while they are to pay the legitimate earnings of workers as and when due.
There is no doubt that the short fall in the oil revenue and serial oil theft had adversely undermined the revenue profiles of most states. But the unacceptable delayed payments preceded the recent scandalous non- payment and delayed remunerations. Above all, we have not heard of the non-payments of the executive over-bloated pays of some these defaulting governors. Indeed some of these governors still travel with their long convoys of jeeps to private terminals to board chattered flights even in the face of dwindling revenues.
ILO standards on wages most ratified by Nigeria address these problems by providing for regular payment of wages, the fixing of minimum wage levels, and the settlement of unpaid wages in case of employer insolvency. Some of them include labour clauses (Public Contracts) Convention, 1949 (No. 94), and Protection of Wages Convention of 1949 (No. 95). Delayed payment is double jeopardy for the affected workers because the problems of Naira devaluation and rising prices (inflation) means when arrears paid, worth less than the delayed pay. For instance, the current N18,000 national minimum wage at the exchange rate of N150 to $1, amounts to some $120 per month in 2010.
However with the devaluation of the currency and current exchange rate of almost N200 to $1, minimum wage has dropped to as low as $90 dollars per month, a shortfall of $30. When we take into consideration the rising inflation it is clear the real income of the working people has declined by over 50% within the last four years. Nigeria now has working poor whose monthly pay can hardly take them home because of government unstable policies. Nigeria certainly cannot be developed with working poor or working beggars who live on delayed worthless pay. Austerity measure must first reflect through reduction in costs of governance and not delayed legitimate pay of working men and women.