Comrade Ben Ukpepi, the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) chairman in Cross River State, on Thursday, said that the take-home N30,000 national minimum wage no longer takes Nigerian workers home.

Ukpepi disclosed this while commemorating the 2021 International Day for Decent Working Environment in Calabar.

The 2021 Day has “Just Jobs” as its theme, NAN reports.

Ukpepi explained that it was obvious that the workforce in Nigeria was working in environments that were deficient in indecency, adding that something needed to be done.

He said, “Today in Cross River, we are marking the World Decent Work Day as a result of the growing trend of huge deficit of decent work in our society.

“We see this every day in the state in the ‘casualisation’ of workers, retirement without gratuity, promotion without implementation and a dilapidated working environment.

“It’s sad that even those in the Cross River Civil Service are being converted to casual workers and there is a huge debt of non-payment of gratuity to many of our retired comrades.

“According to the ILO, decent work is a job that is secured with social security and the workers entitled to form trade unions for the protection of their rights,” he said.

Ukpepi called on the governments, both at the federal and state levels, to ensure that there was decent and profitable work for the teeming population of the nation, especially the youths.

He further stated that this was one of the ways to ensure that the youths didn’t become willing tools in the hands of desperate politicians who abandoned them after winning election