Kufuor's comments on End of Service Benefit, TUC fires back

The Trades Union Congress (TUC) said Monday that its demand for restoration of the End of Service Benefit (ESB) for workers was based on the principle of equity and informed by the quest for social justice.

"It is a demand that is consistent with the application of the fundamental right of workers to collectively bargain. Workers have simply called for the reintroduction of a facility that existed in the past and was frozen as a result of variety of circumstances," Mr Kwasi Adu-Amankwa, Secretary-General of the TUC, said at a press briefing in Accra in reaction to recent statements by President Kufuor on the ESB at Tamale.

President John Agyekum Kufuor was reported to have said that the government would not be held to ransom by unrealistic workers' demands. The Greater Accra Region Council of Labour last week asked its members to wear red bands and hoist red flags to back their demand for the restoration of the ESB.

Mr Adu-Amankwa described as " unsavoury" the president's comment that workers' leaders were deceiving their rank and file. "A statement like this tends to pitch workers against their leaders and is therefore potentially divisive."

He said the TUC was a responsible organisation that used democratic structures to decide and act. "It is therefore insulting to us to suggest that workers are being used by certain people to achieve their own agenda''.

Mr Adu-Amakwa said the TUC took a strong exception to this particular statement since history had shown it to be precursor to clamp down on workers' rights.

Some of the comments on the issue by the President constituted political intolerance just like the TUC's stand on water privation that was also condemned because it held a contrary view, he said.

"We will like to use this opportunity to remind the government that when Ghanaians voted for 'positive change' it included a healthier political culture that has tolerance as one of its key ingredients."

Mr Adu Amankwa said genuine democracy demands that the government mediates between the competing interests and pressures that come from different sections of the people.

"Indeed we believe that it does a democratic government more credit to 'kowtow' to and negotiate pressures with different sectors of the population than to pressures from international financial institutions".

He said the red bands and hoisting of the flags was called for by the Tema West Union after a letter to the government on the ESB was not replied to and that the decision was not nationwide as being assumed.