David President of the Chemical and Non-Metallic Products Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (CANMPSSAN), Segun David, speaks to GLORIA NWAFOR on how COVID-19 impacted Nigerian workers, need for another review of the national minimum wage, ways government can tackle insecurity in the country and other related issues. With the theme of this year’s May Day celebration, ‘COVID-19: Social Economic Crisis – The Challenges for Decent Jobs, Social Protection and Welfare’, in what ways do you think the pandemic has impacted Nigerian workers? COVID-19, in so many ways, has made some positive and negative impact on Nigerian workers. Some employers used the opportunity to better the lots of workers while some did otherwise. Some of them did so many things that were inimical to the growth of workers under the pretense of COVID-19. For instance, a lot of companies downsized arbitrarily and indiscriminately, while some even went ahead to reduce the salary of workers. Now that things have improved reasonably, those salaries were not reversed. Also, we saw where a majority of companies declare huge profits than they usually made in recent past. But most of them to date have not done salary appraisals and yet they are declaring huge profits. These profits, if I may say, part of it was gotten as a result of suppression of workers because some of them did not increase salary, some employees retired and there were no replacements, they froze promotions and in all these, they counted them as profits, not even considering the workers that worked for them to make these profits.