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Organised Labour have said they have not given up on their planned strike action, which was supposed to have followed their nationwide demonstration.

The pressure group on Wednesday, held a nationwide demonstration in protest of what they described as killer taxes on petroleum products and exorbitant hikes in utility tariffs.

They had earlier issued a roadmap to force government to reduce the taxes and utility hikes as well as demand a 50% increase in salaries of public sector workers.

As part of the roadmap, public sector workers were supposed to have embarked on a strike action immediately after the demonstration, however this has not been the case.

In line with this, many are questioning whether Organised Labour has backtracked on its threats to embark on the industrial action captured in its roadmap.

But speaking on Citi FM’s news analysis programme, The Big Issue,  in relation to the labour issues, the Vice President of the National Association of Graduate Teachers (NAGRAT), Angel Karbonu explained that they have only decided to set it aside to continue with negotiations.

“We have not called off the strike as if it is no longer on our agenda. We have set it aside for now to allow negotiations to go on.

The outcome of the negotiation will determine what action we will take from the next time we sit with government because it’s also not fair that you are negotiating with your employer and then you go and announce a strike.

It’s not done in labour relations.”

Meanwhile, Kingsley Offei Nkansah, General Secretary of the General Agric Workers Union also speaking on The Big Issue explained that they are currently evaluating the outcome of the demonstration.

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“Our roadmap did indicate that after every action we will go back to review the action and make an assessment of how far we’ve gone in the negotiations.

That is precisely what happened after Wednesday after which we went back to the table with government on Thursday afternoon and went ahead.

The government started making some concessions in our directions, we also stated what our concerns are and we agreed that we will sit again come Tuesday,” he added.

He said the demonstration was to send a clear signal to government about the plight of workers in the country.

“We wanted to send a clear signal to government that enough is enough, that the suffering had gotten too far so let us facilitate the conversation on the table better. To make them understand, we held a nationwide action.”

We were fair with government

When asked why they still embarked on the demonstration despite negotiating with government, Mr. Nkansah insisted that they had been fair with government saying “the action was communicated to them before we did it. It’s not like we did it out of the blue.”

Meeting not in deadlock

He also rejected claims that the negotiations with government has hit a deadlock because none of the parties were willing to compromise their stance saying “it’s an impasse not a deadlock.”