Kayode Shopekan
NIGERIAN Railway workers will embark on a 3-day warning strike from Nov. 18-20, to press home their demand for improved welfare package for its members
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The workers have written to the District Chairman/Secretary Nigeria Union of Railway workers and Senior Staff Association, stating their resolve to proceed on a three-days national warning strike.
“Our agitation for enhanced salary cannot be overemphasized as it is an open secret that the salary regime of the Nigerian Railway workers is the worst and most incomprehensible of all salary structures available to the parastatals under the supervision of the federal ministry of transport”.
The workers stated that the Nigerian government spends billions in building railways which have no dint of impact or improvement in the welfare of the workers in terms of improved remuneration.
The letter read;
“The Honorable Minister of Transport once acceded to the fact that Nigerian Railway workers can easily be identified from the crowd by the way they look and dress which he meant to be strikingly suggestive of the very poor salary paid in the corporation.
“It baffles us so much that the federal government spends billions of dollars on building rail transport infrastructure and transforming the system to a modern railway system but with no dint of impact or improvement in the welfare of the workers in terms of improved remuneration.
“We wonder how long the Honorable Minister of Transport will keep avoiding the railway workers and consciously failing in getting better pay for the impoverished Nigerian Railway workers. We wonder how long we will wait before we get our demand for improved salary approved just like that of National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) where workers’ salaries were recently upped by three hundred percent.”
The Nigeria Union of Railwaymen (NUR) and its sister body, Senior Staff Association for the Statutory Corporation and Government-owned Company (SC GOC), had earlier given the Federal Government and the National Railway Corporation (NRC) a three-week ultimatum to address its welfare concerns to prevent a total industrial action across the country.
