Director-General of Micheal Imoudu National Institute for Labour Studies (MINILS), Issa Aremu has called for the suspension of the doctors’ strike.
Gatekeepers News reports that the Unionists Director of MINILS has urged the resident doctors and the federal government of Nigeria to dialogue to put an end to the ongoing industrial strike action.
On August 2, the National Association of Resident Doctors (NARD) resumed a nationwide strike action for several reasons including delays in the payment of their salaries and allowances.
Aremu made this appeal at the opening ceremony of the 2021 Training on Advocacy and Communication for Women’s Cooperatives & Economic Empowerment Collectives (WEECs) on Monday, August 9, 2021, organised in partnership with the development Research and Projects Centre (dRPC).
The workshop attracted 35 participants who are 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.
Aremu called for urgent reform of the industrial relations system in the country’s health sector for sustainable peace and service delivery.
He added that 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 the “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.
The MINILS Director General said, “I have also been saying it that delayed payment of salaries of medical personnel such as doctors and nurses and teachers amounted to wage theft. But so also indiscriminate indefinite strike under a COVID:19 amounts to willful unacceptable Industrial suicide.”
According to him, MINILS was set to bridge the existing abysmal knowledge gap about labour market issues concerning trade unionism, conflict resolution, strikes, and strike management in critical sectors like education and health sectors.
Aremu noted that “A strike is NOT a war certainly not a mutually assured destructive war as we are witnessing in Nigeria,” adding that Strike is ‘a temporary stoppage of work by a group of employees to express a grievance or enforce a demand’ after which the workers would return to the same jobs with the same terms.
He stressed that it was time all parties suspended the existing unhelpful actions and returned to negotiations in the health sector.
The Minister of State for Labour and Employment, Festus Keyamo, who declared the workshop opened, said arrangement has been concluded to train the newly elected trade union leaders at Michael Imoudu National Institute for Labour Studies (MINILS) for certification in the effective discharge of their responsibility with respect to representation of members and promotion of Industrial harmony.
Keyamo added that with the new management, the Institute is set to become the think tank for labour market issues.
He, therefore, commended President Muhammadu Buhari for appointing Aremu as the first unionist Director General of the Institute.
