Strange as it is, a bill, which is aimed at punishing employers who owe salaries passed the first reading at the House of Representatives
without qualms. This development, to an extent, underscores the importance that the lawmakers attach to the issue.Unhappy with the habit of unpaid salaries of workers, the House of Representatives in a novel bill proposed to criminalise the failure to pay salaries by corporate bodies and other employers of labour nationwide. The goal is noble.
Section 8 of the bill states that if an employee’s compensation remains unpaid beyond the specified period permitted by the legislation, the employee may submit a written demand to his or her employer for the payment of entitlement, if the fellow wishes to assert the claim. With this proposed legislation, employers are obligated to provide written terms of employment to resuming employees within 14 working days of the employee’s return to work.
Curiously, the bill did not expressly include federal ministries, departments and agencies , state governors, and state agencies who may become guilty of owing workers salaries, pensions and gratuities. Although the president and states’ chief executives enjoy constitutional immunity, they could be sanctioned on leaving office, if the bill accommodates the interest of state workers.
Speaking on the matter, the President of the Nigerian Union of Pensioners in the state, Mr Ikechukwu Ekere, who is also a member of the committee, said that after the committee submitted its report last September, the government cleared only two months’ pension arrears owed to core civil servants, but their gratuities remained unpaid.
Not long ago, the State Governor, Francis Nwifuru, approved and released N4billion to offset the backlog of arrears, pensions and gratuities from 1996 to 2022, which has been paid. In Cross River State, the government is yet to pay January 2024 salaries to some of its workers, who it said have issues such as duplication of their names in the payroll, or whose names appear in more than one bank, but the governor has directed the suspension of the audit exercise to allow for immediate payment of affected workers till February.
Ibadan-based lawyer, Yomi Alliyu said though it is a good step in the right direction, it is a mere populist approach that at best will lead to mass unemployment. “The option left to employers would be mass termination of employees’ appointments. In any case, a contract of employment is civil and no law can give it the toga of crime,” he said.
“A salary not earned is a debt against an employer and recoverable in law. Therefore, an employee has the option of approaching the court on a civil claim for the recovery of his salaries not paid. I therefore urge the National Assembly to jettison this idea forthwith,” he declared. He argued that if the government becomes a debtor to its own employees, then the government officials should be arrested, tried and imprisoned for refusal and or failure to meet the salary obligations of their workers. The new law, he suggested, should set the terminal date when every outstanding salary should be paid, failing which the employer is charged for the criminal infraction that would carry penal consequences.
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