*Pix below(l-r): Senate President Akpabio and Speaker Abbas
President of the Senate, Godswill Akpabio, has said the new minimum wage bill stipulates that employers cannot pay their domestic workers such as drivers, housemaids, and gatemen below the N70,000 benchmark. This so, because they are your most reliable workforce you may not easily understand.
Akpabio stated this during the plenary session on Tuesday after the new minimum wage bill was passed into law.
He said, “If you are a tailor and you employ additional hands, you cannot pay them below N70,000. If you are a mother with a newborn child and you want to hire a housemaid to look after your child, you cannot pay the person below the approved minimum wage. It is not a maximum wage. It applies to all and sundry.
“If you hire a driver or gateman, you cannot pay them below N70,000. So, I’m very delighted that this has been passed, and we now look forward to employers of labour improving on what has been set as a benchmark for all to follow.
“I congratulate the Nigeria Labour Congress, all Nigerians, and the National Assembly for this epoch-making legislation, which has even reduced the term of negotiations from five years to three years in view of the increasing cost of living. This is, again, a landmark legislation, so congratulations.”
Recall that the National Assembly had approved the new minimum wage bill of N70,000 for Nigerian workers during a plenary session yesterday.
The bill which was proposed by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu came after months of negotiations between the Federal Government and the organized labour of the country.
On their part, the labour initially proposed a sum of N495,000 as the new minimum wage only to reduce it to N250,000 after meeting with the minimum wage committee.
However, following a couple of meetings with President Bola Tinubu, labour agreed on the sum of N70,000, prompting the president to send a new minimum wage bill to the House of Representatives and the Senate.
The bill also includes a revision of the interval of the timeline from 5 years to 3 years.
The bill is expected to be signed by President Tinubu in the next couple of days, effectively making it a law in Nigeria.
This I even as some domestic employers are already grumbling as to their capacity to afford as much as N70,000 to pay their domestic workers monthly, in the face of the rising cost of living in the country. Will they be able to to afford it afterall? Will they not? Only time shall tell./###
