Union to submit minimum wage proposal by end July

Ghana’s Trade Union Congress has agreed to submit its minimum wage plan to the Ministry of Employment and Social Welfare by the end of July, a news source in Accra told IRIN on Wednesday. This undertaking follows a meeting on Monday between both sides. However, the agreement failed to block a three-hour nationwide demonstration on Tuesday by workers protesting the government’s failure to offer “an acceptable” minimum wage, the source said. The current minimum wage is 3,505 cedis (54 US cents) a day but the rapidly falling value of the currency - now at 6,450 to the US dollar - has worsened economic conditions. In order to mitigate this, government early this year proposed a 3-percent salary increase which, the source said, most employers cannot afford to pay. In contrast, he added, “all government employees earn far above this wage.” The minister for employment and social welfare, Muhammad Mumuni, has blamed the country’s economic downturn on poor cocoa and gold prices at a time of rising costs for crude oil. “This situation of a low market price of our commodities has led to a loss of 450 million cedis (US $69,767) and for a small economy such as ours, this is a huge amount,” he said, according to PANA.