900K Labour Congress Members Contemplating Their Choice For The Presidency
PHOTO: John Nyemah Natt, the Acting Secretary General, Liberia Labor Congress
By Augustine Octavius, augustineoctavius@gmail.com
The leadership of the 900,000 members of the Liberia Labor Congress is expected to decide on who among the presidential candidates who workers in the private and public sectors will endorse in the wake of deteriorating relationship between LLC and the Ministry of Labor.
LLC Acting Secretary General, John Nyemah Nat, disclosed that the decision will be made early October, in order give all the presidential candidates the opportunity to outline respective policy on the rights on public sector workers to associate with any union.
Addressing a press conference in Monrovia recently, Mr. Nat called on President George Weah to immediately intervene in the worsening relationship between the LLC and the government.
According to him, already a vast majority of the civil servants including teachers and health workers are very unhappy about the manner in which they were affected by the salary harmonization and the downward trend in the performance of government institutions, since the inception of the Coalition for Democratic Change-led (CDC) government.
The LLC Acting Secretary General made it unequivocally clear that the workers will eventually declare support the presidential candidate who will ensure that his government will respect the rights of workers of all sectors to unionize.
There has been deterioration on the relations between the leadership of the LLC and the Ministry of labor on what it termed as interference by the ministry in the affairs of the organization.
One of the factors is that government does not want the Civil Servants Association of Liberia, the National Teachers Association of Liberia and the National Health Workers Association to join the Liberia Labor Congress.
Many of government workers have made clear that they will vote against the CDC-government, because of the massive slash in the salaries as a result of the harmonization.
To add insult to injury, the Ministry of Labor recently conducted an election in which the bulk of the union member-organizations boycotted.
When the Labor Ministry was contacted, Labor Minister Cllr. Charles Gibson said he was not in town at the time of the writing of this story.