We could have avoided strike – Osifo

The president of the Trade Union Congress (TUC), Festus Osifo, has said that the organized labour could have avoided strike if the federal government had gone beyond the N60,000 it earlier proposed for minimum wage.

Osifo stated this during an interview with Arise TV on Wednesday, June 5.

Osifo said: “There could be different reasons everybody wants you to embark on strike, but for us in the Labour movement, it’s a very weighty decision before we go on strike.

“If you remember, I was in this studio over three or four different sessions, hammering on the fact that we have given an ultimatum and it expires 31st of May.

“What the President did today, if he had done it like a week or two weeks earlier, we wouldn’t have been here. Those marching orders should have been given before now. We gave a lot of signals, if you remember there was a dead lock, if you remember we walked out, so those things were signals to trigger the authorities to act, so strike for us is at the last resort.

“And the meeting we had last week Friday, we told the government representatives that ‘we are ready to sit here and wait till midnight’, until they come up with an improved mandate, because we knew clearly that if we leave that meeting without any improved position it will lead to an industrial action, so we waited.”