Following the announcement of the 9.60 new minimum wage, the Progressive People’s Party (PPP) has called on the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) to ensure compliance.
According to the PPP, though the new minimum wage was ‘meagre,’ government must ensure that “all workers receive at least the promised…minimum wage.”
The PPP made the call in a statement signed by its National Secretary, Murtala Mohammed, which statement was issued in Accra yesterday.
According to the statement, Ghanaian workers were tired of the announcement of minimum wages by successive governments without commensurate adherence.
“Governments over the years have routinely increased the minimum wage, but failed to ensure compliance at the grassroots. Hardworking Ghanaians continue to take salaries below the minimum wage while government sits aloof and does nothing,” the statement lamented.
Against this backdrop, the PPP charged the Akufo-Addo administration to break this “culture, ensuring that Ghanaian workers enjoy this “promised minimum wage.”
“We cannot, in the name of private sector participation, continue to treat our workers in such inhumane manner,” it noted.
The PPP in the statement also underscored that it was the duty of government to create the enabling economic environment for citizens to create for themselves suitable jobs on living wages.
Minimum wage, it stressed, must be such that it can more than match the cost of living of the people.
“No Ghanaian worker can have a decent lifestyle with the current minimum wage which, to all intents and purposes, is even only at the subsistence level. This only breeds corruption and other anti-social vices, kills enthusiasm and increases unfairly the dependency rate on the few who are beyond the threshold minimum. This in the long run increases the poverty level of the people and breeds despondency,” it asserted.
To this end, the PPP proposed to the central government to move away from what it described as “these meagre minimum wages” and rather create the enabling condition for a living wage via productivity increase enhancements.
The Ghanaian worker, the statement went on to add, deserves to live in dignity.
“If the working conditions of the people are decent, production will increase via enhanced motivation, leading to the economic freedom that we so much seek,” the statement noted.
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