By Ameen Aym, Abuja.
The easy recourse to Strike action by the NLC is getting too frequent and too much to bear with attendant negative effect of slowing down the overall economic performance and growth.
NLC must realize that Nigeria has a large category of people who have to engage in daily menial jobs in order to earn what they can feed themselves and their families.
Can the nation continue to be held to ransom by the actions of a small percentage of our working population ?
What is the percentage of these category of workers who are members of the NLC, TUC and other public sector labour unions who frequently hold the nation to ransom every now and then?
What are their numbers in comparison to the total public vs private sectors labour force in this country; vis a vis the nuisances and discomfort their actions cause to the overall population in this country?
This is food for thought..
I believe the labour unions must be defanged by the enactment of new laws by the national assembly similar to the action taken by the former British Prime Minister, late Margret Thatcher who undertook far reaching labour reforms that saw to peace and tranquility which lead to unprecedented economic growth in the UK.
Hate or love her, Margret Thatcher upon coming into office took positive and aggressive actions that broke the backbones of stubborn labour leaders. Her leadership of the conservative government helped to finally put paid to the powers of labour unions over the British economy in the 80’s.
The labour unions in this country are under the false impression that everyone else is a salary earner like they are, and that we all have to wait until the end of the month in order to get a salary… on the contrary, the majority of people in our country are not salary earners but daily wage earners.
The NLC and other labour unions must adopt other means of agitation rather than engaging in this type of vacuous and endless calls for cat strikes that are at best ineffective, more political and have lost the potency of being pressure points that force the hands of the government into taking decisions they don’t want to.
The labour unions must be stopped through the enactment of anti-strike-laws by the national assembly in order to defang and take away their much abused powers to call for national strike action in Nigeria.
