Candidates must meet with us because we own the Labour Party.

The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) leadership, Joe Ajaero, has stated that the union owns the Labour Party (LP) and that elected party candidates must meet with the union to discuss its programs.
The labor president stated this during a courtesy visit to various unions in Lagos on Thursday, revealing that it would continue to be involved in politics in order to push issues concerning worker welfare to the forefront of government programs and policies.

National Union of Electricity Workers, National Union of Banking, Insurance, and Financial Institutions, and Nigeria Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers were among the unions.

Ajaero said that the Labour Party was owned by the labor movement since its inception.

Candidates must meet with us because we own the Labour Party.
The NLC has a political party called the Labour Party, which ran in the recent elections.

“Nigeria must exist before we can practice unionism. Whoever who becomes President of Nigeria will work with us, and workers’ rights and benefits must be protected. The current wage structure, casualization policy, and outsourcing are anti-worker; with such policies, we cannot be our brothers’ keepers,” Ajaero explained.

He also encouraged union members to get involved in politics, adding, “We haven’t been managing it on our own. We’ve started letting people from outside to answer LP.”

Ajaero asked members to continue informing workers about the Labour Party throughout the country.

“That is exactly what we did.”

are going to impose on them. Even the ones that have emerged as senators or House of Representatives members, they must, as a necessity, meet with us and we will give them our programmes. That is the whole essence of thinking of LP in the first place; so that their actions, inaction, and utterances will reflect the affairs of the labour movement, and there should be no pretences about it,” the NLC chief explained.

He pointed out that “we are not saying that people cannot belong to any party of their choice, but we have a party where whatever we discuss here, we take it there as workers.

“Where, if we want new minimum wage, we take it to the people that represent us there; all these issues concern the workers, and we should no longer shy away from it.”