By El-Yakub Dogara
Nasarawa State Governor, Engineer Abdullahi Sule has announced his administration’s decision to commence the implementation of the five years outstanding workers promotion.
The five years worker promotion of 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 will take effect from July this year.
The Governor gave the assurance while interacting with labour leaders in the state preparatory to indefinite strike over the non implementation of pending promotions from 2019 to date.
Engineer Sule said the demand by labour for the implementation of the promotion of workers from 2019 to date, would amount to about N200m is the easiest to approve but it will mean suspension of the implementation of the new minimum wage for a period up to two years.
Governor Sule conceded to the demands of the organized labour in the state by accepting to implement a backlog of promotions for workers, instead of implementing the new N70,000 minimum wage.
Recall that the Governor has announced the decision of his administration to commence the implementation of the new minimum wage this August, promising to even pay workers arrears of three months starting from May, June and July all in August.
However, the labour unions during the meeting, prevailed on the Governor to suspend the implementation of the new minimum wage and pay them their outstanding promotions.
He declared his administration’s readiness to transparency and open door policy, he reeled out all the options available considering the financial capability of the state, allowing the labour unions to make their decision based on the resources at the disposal of the state.
“I am much more aware, more than two months ago, that we have agreed about promotion between 2019 to date, that is from 2019-2023. The idea was to address promotion for the last four years 2019 to 2023 so that we will be up to date. We will not fall into the same problem that we had, which I inherited, where workers were not promoted for over eight years”.
He explained that even though the federation allocation to the state has improved following the removal of oil subsidy, cost of materials have also appreciated such that even with the improved allocation Nasarawa State will still not be able to implement both the promotion of workers and new minimum wage at the same time.
