Trade unions have been urged to cooperate with government to ensure job creation, respect for human rights and protection of the environment.

In his May Day message, Mr Solomon Stephen Ashalley Kotei, General Secretary of the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU) – Ghana, said government needed to develop healthy policies that would ensure that businesses do not thrive at the expense of workers, society and the environment.

Touching on the theme for this year’s May Day celebration: “Pensions: It is Your Right and Your Responsibility,” the ICU General Secretary said government, employers and labour together must work to ensure that workers who retire from active service were well catered for.

Mr Kotei noted that the time had come for stakeholders to focus attention on improved pensions that would ensure that workers did not retire with meager benefits.

On the oil find, he said, it had opened wide Ghana’s doors to ensure a healthy environment and society based on sound foundation.

He said the ICU was proud to be part of organised labour that had championed the interest of workers for the past 50 years.

“We shall continue to champion the course of workers’ rights, and will do so in a manner that will ensure a sense of partnership in the creation of wealth and reciprocation of economic dignity and social justice to our teeming members and the working populace in general, whose toil and sweat had contributed immensely to the socio-economic development of Ghana.”