The Nigeria Labour Congress has rejected claims that it brokered the ₦40,000 consequential adjustment paid to federal workers after the ₦70,000 national minimum wage took effect, insisting the negotiations belonged to public sector unions.
In a Sunday statement signed by Acting General Secretary Comrade Benson Upah, the Congress accused unnamed individuals of twisting Nigeria’s collective bargaining framework to mislead workers and fracture the labour movement.
The NLC drew a firm line between two different exercises. Its mandate in the 2024 talks, it said, covered only the national minimum wage, the floor below which no worker should be paid, which is set through a tripartite process involving labour, government and employers.
Consequential adjustments, by contrast, involve reviewing existing salary structures to reflect the new minimum, and those are handled sector by sector.
In the public sector, that task fell to the Joint Public Service Negotiating Council, made up of government representatives and about eight trade unions with their national leadership. State-level councils handle negotiations with state governments, while industrial unions deal with employers’ associations in the private sector, as in food and beverage, where the Association of Food, Beverage and Tobacco Employers negotiated with the National Union of Food, Beverages and Tobacco Employees.
The Congress was emphatic that representing workers in both sectors does not make it the negotiator of consequential adjustments for individual unions, and that sector union leaders bear sole responsibility for those outcomes.
On the ₦40,000 specifically, the NLC said the claim that it negotiated the across-the-board addition is not only false but a deliberate distortion of the bargaining framework, and that the outcome rested with public sector union leadership.
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The statement also accused some individuals of shifting blame to create confusion within the labour movement as preparations begin for a fresh minimum wage round, and maintained that the NLC has never negotiated consequential adjustments with government or organised private employers at any point in the history of minimum wage setting.
The Congress warned that pinning the ₦40,000 outcome on it could weaken worker unity at a critical moment, saying the enemies of the working class are trying to sow division by obscuring where responsibility truly lies.
Looking ahead, the NLC pledged to push for a new minimum wage that reflects current economic realities and moves closer to a living wage, and urged workers and the public to hold the right institutions accountable for their respective roles. It also promised measures to ensure future consequential adjustment talks are handled by the appropriate bodies and deliver better results for workers.