AS organised labour marched yesterday in celebration of Workers’ Day, top on the agenda was the implementation of the N18, 000 minimum wage that some States claim they cannot pay. Labour has lamented the impoverishment of workers over the years. It has done little else.
A more pressing issue that should interest labour is the rate of job losses. Governments may be launching job creation schemes, but the reality is that hundreds of thousands of jobs are lost annually, including government ones.
The Manufacturers Association of Nigeria, MAN, last February said the industry lost more than 1.8 million jobs between 2002 and 2008. The yearly average for the seven years is more than 257,000jobs. MAN’s membership operational audit in January 2010 revealed that 834 manufacturing companies shut down in 2009. These figures are for manufacturing alone.
Former United Nations Development Programme economist Dr. Warea Thomas gives the matter better perspective. “The fact is that when a company stops operation, the workers there become the frontline victims. If 834 firms were officially given by MAN to have shut shop in 2009, it is easy to speculate that not less than 83,400 jobs were lost in that year alone, if we assume that they were all medium-size manufacturing firms, with each having 100 workers.”
According to MAN, “A survey of about 300 manufacturing companies carried out by MAN on direct employment generation from the manufacturing sector showed that in 2001 alone, 2,752,832 people were employed by the Nigerian manufacturing sector.
“In 2002, the figure rose to 2,841,083. This figure reduced to 1,026,305 in 2008 as a result of some challenges inhibiting its growth. Of all kinds of economic activities, the manufacturing activity is reputed to have the highest multiplier effect on indirect employment generation, both in the backward and forward integration process along the supply chain.”
The decline in manufacturing has left millions unemployed. The inability of those people to remain in economic activities as workers and consumers, contribute to the increase in poverty levels.
“In the heyday of manufacturing in Nigeria (1978–1980), the national poverty level was 28.17 per cent. With the declining roles of manufacturing, the poverty level gets increasing and it got to a peak of 70.9 per cent in 2006,” the MAN document noted.
Workers are worried about their jobs. The ageing ones also have concerns about their retirement benefits. In an economy buffeted by vast infrastructural challenges, increasing cost of production and cheaper imports endanger the chances of creating new jobs.
New investments in public power supply, roads, railways, seaports which are necessary to make manufacturing more profitable and able to create more jobs are inadequate.
The growing unemployment among youth, in some instances years after higher education, cannot be addressed without huge manufacturing bases that will start off the multiplier effects the economy requires.
Labour has a contribution to make in these other than lamenting the fate of workers. It should start engaging governments strategically at policy-making stages to influence decisions that will generate more jobs.
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