By VICTOR AHIUMA-YOUNG

The organised labour, yesterday, in Lagos, expressed worries over the level of implementation of the Employee Compensation Scheme, ECS, lamenting that a situation where only 500,000 employees out of over 80 million workers in the country, had been covered by the scheme in the last three years when the ECS kicked off, was unsatisfactory.

Vice President of the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, Issa Aremu, who spoke at an Interactive Forum and Award ceremony of the NSTIF/NECA, said the level of compliance by employers was also very low given the fact that only 7,000 had keyed in.

Aremu challenged the Nigeria Social Insurance Trust Fund, NSITF, to be more aggressive in ensuring that employers complied with the scheme.

According to him: “The time has come for the NSITF to be aggressive in ensuring full compliance by employers as getting employers to voluntarily comply with the law may not yield much result.

“So far, I want to commend NSITF because they started from ground zero to build some reserves.

“At least, there is now some level of compliance from employers. Don’t forget that this law makes it mandatory for every employer to contribute one per cent of employees’ total emoluments to this pool.

“Now, as we are being told, they have captured 7,000 employers and according to the figures they gave us, about 500,000 employees are captured in the past three years.

“For me and those of us in  organised labour, that is a far cry from the ideal because Nigeria has about 80 million workers.

“Already, we have close to 4.5million workers who are members of NLC, now compare to 500,000 that has been captured within three years, that is very insignificant.

Earlier, Chairman, Board of Directors of NSITF, Dr. Ngozi Olejeme, assured all stakeholders of the Fund’s commitment in ensuring that the ECS is implemented to their satisfaction.

Represented by Mr. Aderemi Adegboyega, she appealed to employers yet to register with the scheme without further delay, stressing that the advantages of compliance far outweighs that of non-compliance.