Labour advocates economic diversification driven by industrialisation

Worried by the number of jobs that may be lost due to economic downturn and uncertainties in the country, the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) has called on the federal government to explore opportunities in the real sector, by reviving ailing industrial firms under its diversification agenda.

According to the NLC, for the government’s diversification agenda to succeed, it must industrialise the country, as dependence on the oil sector is no longer sustainable.

Specifically, the union’ in its May address opined that, the best way out of the lock-jam the country presently finds itself due to the unstable price of crude oil at the international market is for government to massively industrialise the economy.

This, it said will help to cushion the negative effects of oil price on the economy as well as create more jobs for Nigerians.
“Congress believes that a strong response to the fall in the price of crude oil in the international market is for Nigeria to take advantage of this to eventually diversify and industrialize our economy. This will help to create millions of decent jobs and move the people out of poverty.

“We have proven large quantities of raw materials outside oil, like limestone, cotton, diamond, gold, groundnuts, and cocoa among others. With industrial firms, we can transform them into manufactured goods. Industrialization is the key to economic recovery. In the period after independence, the textile sector was a very important sector in terms of production and the volume of jobs that the sector absorbed. It was employing at the height of the textile boom, over 320,000 workers. Today the sector has struck to employing less than 50,000 workers. We call on the Federal and State governors to work to review the sector,” NLC said.

Dwelling on the adverse effects of casualization on workers, the NLC said called on government to fine-tune and enforce the country’s casualization law.

“We note with increasing concern the incidence of casualistaion of work in the country which is a strategy by employers to exploit workers and deny them the benefits of their labour such as fair pay, job security, gratuity, pension and others. This is in violation of extant laws.

“We have observed that this has created a situation akin to slave labour. Accordingly, we call on government to enforce the law on casualistaion in order to free its citizenry from slave labour,” the union said.

It similarly called on the Ministry of Labour and Employment to transparently develop criteria for licensing, monitoring and sanctioning of the outsourcing firms in conjunction with the tripartite partners.

This, according to it would help curtail the alleged excesses of outsourcing firms and their stance on non-unionization of workers.

“We note the increasing adopting of the neo-liberal policy of outsourcing by many companies and even agencies of government.

We call on our members to spare no effort at unionising workers engaged by outsourcing agencies in order to ensure fair pay, and good conditions of service”, It said.

Speaking on the anti-corruption drive of the government, the union called for an establishment of an anti-corruption court for immediate trial of persons found culpable.

Justifying the call for swift trials of culpable persons, the union said “if no concrete convictions are secured in the many corruption trials going on, between now and the next 12-15months, those who have stolen these huge fortunes will start feeling that they can outlive the Buahri Presidency, and return to a regime of “business as usual” as far as corruption is concerned”.

“As organized labour, we were perhaps the first to share the current government’s concern about the impact of corruption in our national life. We believe that one of the fundamental problems of our country presently is endemic corruption. This has penetrated all facets of our national life and is responsible in a very large part, for our retarded development.