By Odimmegwa Johnpeter, Abuja
The federal government has assured the Congress of University Academics (CONUA) of making deliberate efforts to address its grievances.
Minister of State for Labour and Employment, Nkeiruka Onyejeocha, made the promise in Abuja at a meeting she held with the leadership of CONUA aimed at finding solutions to the concerns of the union. This was contained in a statement signed by Patience Onuobia, Head, Press and Public Relations.
The Minister further assured CONUA that as a legitimate organisation, the government would always listen to their issues and resolve them on their merits.
Onyejeocha noted that the government would always remain responsive to resolving labour and other issues in the polity.
She commended CONUA for its ideological stance against strikes and encouraged them to be consistent in-toeing that line of industrial peace and harmony and deploying dialogue to resolve issues.
The minister said she would seek further clarifications from relevant quarters on some of the issues raised by the union in order to arrive at a satisfactory resolution.
Earlier, the national president of CONUA, Niyi Sunmonu, had restated the union’s abhorrence to the use of strikes as a bargaining chip and urged the government to implement all outstanding agreements and direct its relevant agencies to quickly conclude on all pending matters.
The Union also called on the President to expedite action on the measures he promised to put in place to alleviate the hardship occasioned by the removal of fuel subsidies, particularly the announcement of a commensurate minimum wage.
while tabling their grievances, Sunmonu noted that the union was particularly grieved that the government had continued to withhold three and a half months’ salary of CONUA members due to the strike embarked upon by a sister academic union in the university system.
“CONUA, as a union, has consistently maintained that it never declared and was not part of the strike action. What the government has done was to lump together those who embarked on strike with those who did not.
“This is unjust, and it is tantamount to punishing the innocent along with the guilty. Through its unwarranted punishment of CONUA members, the government is inadvertently promoting the use of strikes as means of pursuing workers’ demands,” he said.
The other issues are the non-release of the third-party remittances from the payment of four, out of seven months of withheld salaries (March, April, May, and June 2022); Upward review of the emoluments of university academics, and the payment of one-year arrears of the 35% and 23.5% salary increment for staff of tertiary institutions; delay in the payment of promotion arrears, some of which have spanned seven years, and the non-payment of arrears of Earned Academic Allowance (EAA).
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