For several weeks running now, academic and non-academic workers in the four state-owned tertiary institutions in Osun State have down tools over issues bordering on their welfare and conditions of service. The workers, under the aegis of Council of Academic Staff
Unions in Osun-Owned Tertiary Institutions, CASUOSTI have as their main grouse, the payment of the seven percent peculiar academic
allowance and the CONTISS 2007 salary structure, the CONPOCASS 2009, and the implementation of the retirement age of 65 years as approved by the federal government.
While the government has since yielded by offering the striking workers 75 percent of what they are asking for, the workers have remained adamant, claiming that their counterparts in other states of the federation are already enjoying the negotiated wage. Here again, it seems the perennial dilemma (as indeed the anomaly) of federalised wages – negotiated over and above the heads of state governments – without the benefits of attached revenue.
For clearly understandable reasons, the tendency has often been to explain away the quick resort to the strike option as the language which the employers understand. Unfortunately, this tradition, a carryover from military rule has somewhat persisted even under democratic rule to a point that the weapon has not only become dysfunctional but now stands the risk of being overused. Hardly about
denying the workers their inalienable rights to press for better wages and improved conditions of service. Or even their rights as citizens to organise to press for their group rights. It is more about setting the boundaries of group action within such limits that would not throw the system into a needless and avoidable crisis just for the heck of it. The real danger is that the strike option has since constituted a weapon of first choice which explains its growing epidemic. The dangerous development necessarily compels a new thinking on its use particularly in a state like Osun that is in a hurry to develop.
With due respect to the position of the striking workers, the issue isn't exactly that the current administration of Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola has been indifferent to their welfare. For a government that has shown itself as a veritable partner with the working class,
it would be most uncharitable to brand the government as anti-workers, more so after what is on record as the imaginative way with which the administration responded to the issue of the national minimum wage.
Far from suggesting that the workers are acting without rhyme or reason, the fact of course is that the administration's response to
their demands cannot but be tempered with the other competing demands on the state treasury. This is even more so in a state like Osun whose treasury is known to be rather lean compared with other states in the federation.
This is where it beats imagination that the workers would refuse to accept government's offer of a 75 percent increment as a starting
point. Of course, the understanding here is that the government would implement the agreement 100 percent as soon as the state finances are in shape to carry the weight of the demands. That seems to us a fair proposition; in any case, it would have been a different matter altogether were government to reject both the CONTISS and the CONPOCASS as negotiated. Since that was not the case, the workers ought to have shown greater understanding by calling off their strike even while pressing government for the balance on their negotiated wage including other issues considered outstanding.
We say this because of what is at stake. Needless to state that it is the future of our young ones – the future manpower of the state that
is at stake. While the arrears of negotiated wages and emoluments can be cleared when finances improve, the same cannot be said of the
future and the careers of the affected students that are needlessly thrown into grave jeopardy by the industrial action.
Our plea in the circumstance is for the striking workers to go back to work. As veritable partners in the greater Osun project, any measure on their part which could be interpreted as impeding the wheel of progress must be resisted. Just as the present time calls for
sacrifice, we cannot but ask that they look beyond their group demands to see the big picture.
Osun Defender