JUTH: gardeners, cleaners on strike over 11 months salaries

Cleaners, gardeners and other outsourced staff of the Jos University Teaching Hospital have embarked on an indefinite strike over the non-payment of salaries for 11 months.
The News Agency of Nigeria reports that the strike took effect from Friday, August 11.
Their leader, Esther Rwang, told NAN that they were last paid in August 2016.
She said that their employers were contractors to JUTH.
Rwang said: “We were last paid in August 2016; our employers keep telling us to be patient. They keep telling us that we will soon be paid. But we are tired of fake promises.”
She said that most of the workers were widows with families to cater for.
She said: “Since the ordeal of the non-payment of salaries started, our children have been thrown out of school.
“Many others have also been thrown out of rented apartments.”
One of the cleaners, Grace Pam, told NAN that she had become a perpetual debtor because salaries were not forthcoming.
Pam said: “I have borrowed without paying back; that has cost me most of my friends who currently see me as a liar.”
She advised JUTH’s management to pay off the workers if they no longer needed their services.
NAN reports that relatives of patients on admission now clean the spaces occupied by their relatives.
Prof. Edmund Banwat, JUTH’s Chief Medical Director, however, told NAN that the non-payment of outsourced staff was not peculiar to JUTH.
Banwat said: “Many other tertiary hospitals have even disengaged them long ago.”
He added, however, that he was not aware of the current protest by the outsourced workers.
He added: “No one has formally communicated that to me.”