AS industrial strike by the Nigerian Association of Resident Doctors (NARD) enters second week, a call has been made for an urgent reform of the industrial relations system in the country’s health sector for sustainable peace and service delivery.
Comrade Issa Aremu, Director General of the Michael Imoudu National Institute for Labour Studies (MINILS) made this appeal in Abuja on Monday, 9th August, 2021at the opening ceremony of the 2021 Training on Advocacy and Communication for Women’s Cooperatives and Economic Empowerment Collectives (WEECs) organised in partnership with development Research and Projects Centre (dRPC).
The workshop attracted 35 participants drawn from 35 women leaders from as many as hundreds of cooperative societies; associations of market women and women traders; trade unions, associations of producers; and women’s groups running micro, small and medium enterprises in the country.
Comrade Aremu said it was time stakeholders in the health sector played by what he called “the knowledge-based rules of collective bargaining, social dialogue, mediation and conciliation to prevent incessant work stoppages in hospitals with attendant costs to lives.”
While condemning what he called “delayed and non-payment of workers” in the health sector, the Director General also flayed the prevalence of indefinite strikes in the sector which he said had led to avoidable loss of lives.
“I have also been saying it that delayed payment of salaries of medical personnel such as doctors and nurses and teachers amounts to wage theft. But so also is indiscriminate indefinite strike under Covid-19 pandemic amounts to willful unacceptable industrial suicide,” Comrade Aremu said, adding that MINILS was set to bridge the existing abysmal knowledge gap about labour market issues with respect to trade unionism, conflict resolution, strikes and strike management in critical sectors like education and health sectors.
“A strike is not a war, certainly not a mutually assured destructive war, as we are witnessing in Nigeria. Strike is ‘a temporary stoppage of work by a group of employees in order to express a grievance or enforce a demand’ after which the workers would return to the same jobs with the same terms.
Comrade Aremu said it was time all parties suspended the existing “unhelpful actions” and returned to negotiations in the health sector.
Declaring the workshop open, the Honourable Minister of State for Labour and Employment, Mr. Festus Keyamo (SAN) said arrangements have been concluded to train newly elected trade union leaders at MINILS for certification in effective discharge of their responsibilities with respect to representation of members and promotion of industrial harmony.
The minister said with the new management, the institute was set to become the think tank for labour market issues. He commended President Muhammadu Buhari for appointing Comrade Aremu as the first unionist Director General of the Institute.
