Give tax reliefs to local industries - ICU

The General Secretary of the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU) has asked government to give tax reliefs to investors in the textile industry as part of efforts to flush out importers of cheap and inferior prints.

Mr. Solomon Kotei said, “We have written to the Ministry of Trade and Industry demanding that the overheads, the VATS they pay, the electricity they pay, the water they pay is not making them profitable. Where they have gotten now, they’ve all threatened to close down.”

He made this known during the first Tema Regional Council meeting of the ICU for the year 2018 at the Tira Club House, Community two, Tema.

The meeting, which was first after the 10th Quadrennial Delegates Conference of the ICU in August, 2017, was also to outdoor the new Tema Regional officer for the ICU.

He also called on government to “check the unbridled influx of foreign, inferior cheap goods which were competing with locally manufactured goods which is adversely affecting local industries.”

Observing the plight of Ghanaian workers in general, Mr. Kotei hinted on the need to “scrap the overtime tax to make doing overtime an incentive rather than a disincentive, since the tax on overtime payment negates the efforts expended.”

He further informed that the ICU strongly objected to the one percent (1%) National Health Insurance Levy addition proposal and would resist it with all force if government went ahead with it.

The new Tema Regional Officer of ICU, in an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) said that his outfit would depart from violent means of addressing issues that affected workers during his tenure.

He added that, “we have to move away from the era where people bang tables just to demand what they want. We are not going to use adversarial way where we say 'we and them'. But we are going to use dialogue and seek our mutual interests.”