Editorial: When The Worker's Take-Home Pay Does Not Get Home

 

Year 1886, the significant year that heralded open agitations for humane time frame within  which a worker should labour is three centuries away, yet the struggle for better welfare packages by workers has remained a recurring decimal in several nations of the world. However, this agitations seem louder in the developing nations.

In 1886, workers agitated for the 8 hour per day work time and for the first time this was achieved. Before this agitation, workers were made to work at the timing and discretion of their employees.

But today across the world, at least in the public service and formal work environments, the eight hour per day work limit is respected. Over the years, agitations for better working conditions have  led to a lot of improvements. For instance, workers in the civil service and the formal sectors enjoy annual leave, leave grants, promotion and increment in salaries, public holidays, training and retraining to build their capacities among other incentives, and this is largely depending on the sector in question.

Despite these time honoured improvements though, The Eyes Portal Newspapers advances factors that have led to the failure of the work environment in Nigeria and Akwa Ibom state. The first major reason that damaged the work environment is the poorly managed economy.

What governments in Nigeria have done continually is to keep borrowing from external sources like the World Bank and the International monetary Fund ( IMF) among others. We believe debts have led to the debilitating blows that the economy of the country has suffered because instead of the government concentrating on using funds that were generated to progressively grow the economy, what it will do is to continually service debts and even go ahead to collect more loans.

Against the backdrop of the foregoing, the economy is badly wounded and this has led to spiralling inflation. Inflation has come with its own major cost on the life of the average worker. The first major crises that inflation introduces to workers' lives is that it drags down their spending power and then the workers begin to adopt self preservation principles and strategies.

For the workers who are employed in places where a lot of money pass through, the deadly game they play is corruption. They steal brazenly to  build houses, buy cars and give their families the quality of life that they wish. And to be sure the number of people in this category are few, way less than the ones that struggle day in and out to eck a living.

But for the larger number of workers who don't have the opportunity to steal huge sums of money, they'd rather steal whatever little that is available, extort members of the public who seek their services and then steal a lot of time. They find other things to do. So it is not unusual to find a civil servant selling articles in the local market and then such a person will in fact pay more attention to the trading than the civil service job.This explains why a lot of them are not punctual and exhibit incredible truant behaviors.

The state of the civil servants and those in the formal  sector if compared with the informal private sector seems billions of miles better. It is sad and disheartening that most of the persons in the informal private sector are involved in nothing but slave labour. They work for hours unend. Sometimes, they only know when they resume at their working places but cannot determine when they will close. They certainly have no annual leave, leave  grants and public holidays. They also work on weekends and for all these labour, earn so little wages that cannot take them home. The poor working condition of private sector workers is an emergency. Indeed on this year's workers day commemoration, The Eyes Portal Newspapers seeks that the National Assembly and the State Houses of Assembly should start the process of making laws to defend the hapless and helpless workers in the private sector.

Several years after the national minimum wage was approved, many of those in the private sector have never enjoyed it. They are paid less, yet they spend their time working for what does not guarantee any future.

On the 2023 workers day, The Eyes Portal Newspapers believes that it is a shame that unbridled corruption still rules in the nation, thereby making it impossible to direct funds appropriately and ensure workers get what they truly deserve for the work that they do.

Sadly, across the nation, workers have woes due to government's failure to pay them wages that are commensurate with their qualifications and experience. Whatever they are paid can hardly meet their basic needs and at the end of the day, after thirty- five years of work, the average Nigerian worker has no house of his own and is unable to train his or her children in good schools.  It therefore becomes a situation where poverty is transferred from the father's generation to the children's generation. This is the sad reality.

The expectation of The Eyes Portal Newspapers is that, going forward, government will see the worker as a human being who deserves  to leave a legacy upon retirement. In this direction, the government should put in place a system that makes it possible for there to be a housing scheme for civil servants and those in the private sector so that they can easily save towards owning their own homes. In order for this plan to work, then government will consider subsidizing the houses for workers . If this plan goes through for housing, vehicle and other such loans, then the lot of the average worker in Nigeria will be better.