NLC moves to reopen minimum wage battle, seeks pension floor

The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) says it is preparing a fresh nationwide fight to review the ₦70,000 national monthly minimum wage benchmark that took months of bruising negotiation to extract from the federal government just two years ago.

NLC president Joe Ajaero announced the new campaign on Monday at the inauguration of the Godwin Abumisi Pensioners’ Legacy House and Multipurpose Hall in Abuja, pairing it with a fresh demand: a national minimum pension for retirees, arguing that workers’ welfare cannot keep being discussed while pensioners are left to survive on what he called “poverty wages.”

“The Nigeria Labour Congress is currently in the preparatory stages for a major national struggle for a comprehensive review of the national minimum wage,” Ajaero said, according to a report by The Cable. “It is a historical injustice that men and women who devoted their youth, strength and productive years to the service of this nation should be condemned to live below the poverty line after retirement.”

When President Bola Tinubu scrapped the fuel subsidy on his very first day in office in May 2023, followed shortly after by the naira float, transport fares, food prices and the cost of virtually everything else in Nigeria surged overnight, on top of an inflation rate that was already biting hard.

Labour’s opening demand, once minimum wage talks began in early 2024, was ₦615,000, a figure meant to reflect the real cost of feeding and transporting a Nigerian worker’s family under the new economic reality. The government’s opening offer, by contrast, was ₦48,000, barely above the old ₦30,000 floor set back in 2019.

What followed was months of tense, on-and-off negotiations, at least one deadline for an indefinite nationwide strike, and a standoff so sharp that the entire federal government shut down for a day in June 2024 when workers walked off the job over an unresolved electricity tariff dispute tangled up in the same talks.

Labour dropped its ask to ₦250,000. Government inched up to ₦62,000, then finally ₦70,000, a number Tinubu himself pushed in a face-to-face meeting with union leaders, reportedly framed partly around holding the line on petrol prices.

Worn down after nearly a year of back-and-forth, the NLC and Trade Union Congress accepted it on July 18, 2024, and Tinubu signed it into law on July 29 – a 133% jump on paper, but a small fraction of what labour had originally said workers actually needed. Inflation that month was already running at 34%.

Two years on, the ₦70,000 wage – worth roughly $43 at current exchange rates – has been overtaken by the same forces that created it: relentless inflation, a weaker naira, and a cost of living that has kept climbing while the wage floor has stood still.

The law includes a built-in three-year review clause, meaning the next official review isn’t due until 2027 — a timeline the NLC has increasingly signalled it isn’t willing to wait out, given how far the wage has already fallen behind actual living costs.

Ajaero’s Abuja remarks extend that same frustration to the country’s pensioners, whom he said have been left even further behind.

“We cannot continue to allow our senior citizens to survive on pensions that have become poverty wages,” he said. “Every retiree deserves to live with dignity after decades of faithful service to the nation.” He called for the immediate clearing of outstanding pension arrears and a pension system that guarantees dignity in retirement, urging pensioners across the country to stay united for the fight ahead.