Posted by A new minimum salary of N540,000 has been proposed by the South-East branch of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), while a new minimum pay of N447,000 has been proposed by the Trade Union Congress (TUC).
The suggestion was presented during Thursday’s South-East Zonal hearing in Enugu State, which was organized by the Tripartite Committee on National Minimum Wage.
Inflation has eaten away at the purchasing power of the N30,000 minimum wage that went into effect in 2019, according to Comrade Fabian Nwigbo, Chairman of the NLC Enugu State Chapter, who spoke on behalf of the NLC in the area.
He thinks that the current state of affairs in the country makes it unnecessary to bring up the topic of a minimum salary of N30,000.
According to Nwagbo, who characterized the situation as “unfortunate,” workers in Nigeria supposedly earn the lowest wages of any West African country.
His position was that they would base their proposals on Nigerian commodity prices. While the minimum wage was 30,000 Naira in 2019, the price of a bucket of garri was 280 Naira, the price of rice and beans was around 450 Naira each, and the price of fuel was 145 Naira.
A liter of gas currently costs between N750 and N800, yet this has persisted up until the present day.
A paint bucket of rice costs more than N4000 and garri N2,500 in the current state.
“A two-bedroom apartment in Enugu, which used to cost between 250,000 and 300,000 Naira, now costs over 650,000 Naira in the suburbs and over 1.2 million Naira per annum in the city.”