The unfinished May Day: Politics of invisibility
THE demand for an eight-hour workday emerged from centuries of exploitation and collective struggle. In stark contrast, the idea of a seven-day workweek vocally advocated by Narayan Murthy and endorsed by a noble-sounding Sudha Murthy, comes from a social location far removed from the lived realities of most workers.
On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire began like any other workday in a crowded New York garment factory. Young immigrant women bent over sewing machines, racing against targets in a room filled with fabric scraps. In an instant, flames erupted. Trapped inside because the owners had locked the fire escape exit doors, workers jumped to their deaths. In just half an hour, the fire was over, and 146 of the 500 workers — mostly young women — were dead.
This slaying is a chilling reminder of what unregulated capitalism looks like at its worst — workers, mostly young immigrant women, locked inside a factory to prevent breaks and theft, left to burn or jump to their deaths. This is the brutal underside of “efficiency.” Closer home, the December 94 Bhopal gas tragedy stands out as a devastating example of corporate negligence — thousands killed, many more permanently injured, and generations still living with its consequences. Just showed how profit overrides safety, especially when the victims are poor.
More recent examples bring the argument into the present. The mass displacement of informal workers during the COVID-19 lockdown in India revealed how disposable labour is treated — millions forced to walk hundreds of kilometres without wages, transport, or state support. The economy halted, and those who sustained it were abandoned. The eight-hour day is not just a scheduling preference; it is a civilisational milestone. Its roots lie in the 19th-century labour movements, particularly the Haymarket Affair in Chicago, where workers were killed demanding a simple, humane principle: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.”
This slogan asserted a profound truth. Workers are not machines; life must include time for rest, family, thought, and dignity. By contrast, the idea of working all seven days of the week, call it discipline, dedication, or national duty, leans toward normalising overwork. It erases the hard-won boundary between labour and life. For informal workers in India, the tragedy is that many already live this reality — not by choice, but by compulsion. They work seven days a week because sheer survival demands it. To elevate that condition into an ideal is to misunderstand, or worse, legitimises exploitation.
International Workers’ Day commemorates the 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago, where a peaceful rally for worker rights turned violent, resulting in deaths. By 1889, May 1 was designated as a day to honour workers worldwide. According to the International Labour Organisation and India’s National Sample Survey Office, over 90 per cent of India’s workforce — more than 400 million workers — are employed in the informal sector, contributing nearly half of the country’s Gross Value Added.
On each International Workers’ Day, speeches are made, flags raised, and the memory of industrial struggles invoked with ritual precision. The factory, the union, and the eight-hour workday will once again anchor the moral imagination of labour politics. Yet, in a country like India, this imagery feels increasingly out of place — almost archival. The worker who defines our present is not standing at a factory gate. She is walking the streets, stitching garments at home, delivering food on a borrowed motorcycle, cleaning houses she does not own, or carrying bricks on construction sites that will never shelter her.
May Day risks becoming a commemoration of a world that has already slipped away. The tragedy is not merely historical; it is political. In continuing to centre the organised sector, we obscure the overwhelming majority of workers whose labour sustains the economy but whose lives remain unprotected, unrecognised, and precarious.
Over 90 per cent of India’s workforce exists in the informal sector. It is the foundation of the economy. It includes migrant workers, agricultural labourers, domestic workers, street vendors, waste pickers, and, increasingly, those absorbed into the so-called gig economy. Their work is indispensable, yet their existence is structured around uncertainty. There are no contracts, no enforceable minimum wages, no guaranteed social security, and often no identifiable employer.
Labour, in this vast terrain, is both everywhere and nowhere — visible in its output, invisible in its rights. This language performs a quiet violence. It strips away the reality of exploitation and replaces it with a narrative of choice. Flexibility, in this context, does not signify freedom. It signifies the transfer of risk from capital to labour. It is the freedom to be hired and fired without consequence, to work without rest, to survive without security. The ideological language used to describe this transformation is revealing.
Agriculture alone employs over 45 percent of India’s workforce, yet contributes barely 15–16 per cent to GDP, underscoring the scale of low-income, precarious labour embedded in the economy. Despite their centrality, over 80 per cent of informal workers lack any form of social security, including health insurance, pensions, or injury compensation.
The informalisation of labour is deeply tied to the restructuring of the economy under neoliberal policies, where deregulation, privatisation, and the retreat of the state have eroded the institutional protections that once defined labour rights. What remains is a fragmented workforce, difficult to organize and easy to exploit. Capital has adapted swiftly to this new terrain. Labour, by contrast, is still searching for a language adequate to its condition.
A few moments exposed this reality as starkly as the COVID-19 lockdown in India. With no savings, no social security, and no state support, they began walking — hundreds, sometimes thousands of kilometres — back to their villages. The images of these journeys were not merely humanitarian crises; they were political revelations. They showed, with brutal clarity, that the backbone of the economy could be discarded overnight. The lockdown did not create this vulnerability; it exposed it. It revealed an economic order built on the systematic exclusion of those who produce its wealth. It also exposed the limits of a policy framework that continues to treat informal workers as residual — temporary participants in a system that promises, but never delivers, formalisation.
Within this landscape, the condition of women demands particular attention. Women are disproportionately concentrated in the most precarious segments of the informal economy — domestic work, home-based production, and care labour. Much of this work is either unpaid or grossly underpaid, sustained by social norms that devalue women’s contributions.
The informal economy, in this sense, is not merely an economic category; it is also a gendered one. It survives, in part, on the invisibility of women’s labour. In India, more than 90 per cent of working women are employed in the informal sector, and female labour force participation hovers around 20–25 per cent, reflecting not the absence of work, but its systematic invisibility and undervaluation.
Yet, if the informal sector is marked by fragmentation, it is not devoid of resistance. Across the country, new forms of worker organisation are emerging, often outside the framework of traditional trade unions. Collectives of domestic workers, associations of street vendors, and platform-based worker unions are experimenting with new strategies of mobilisation. One of the most enduring examples remains the Self-Employed Women’s Association, which has, for decades, organised women workers in the informal sector around issues of wages, social security, and dignity. These efforts suggest that while the structure of labour has changed, the impulse to organise has not.
Informal workers are not only economically vulnerable; they are also politically marginalised and their transient nature makes collective action difficult and the legal framework remains ambiguous. In the current era, recent labour codes have tended to dilute protections while privileging the interests of capital. Even where rights exist on paper, enforcement is weak.
Traditional labour rights are tied to formal employment — contracts, identifiable employers, and fixed workplaces. But what happens when work is intermittent, locations shift, and employment relationships are obscured?
Universal social protection, access to healthcare, pensions, and basic income security must become entitlements, not privileges contingent on formal employment. For urban informal workers, this also includes access to public spaces — the right of vendors to occupy streets, the right of waste pickers to access recyclable materials. This is an altered paradigm that demands a reorientation of the state — from facilitator of markets to guarantor of justice.
May Day, in this context, must undergo its own transformation. Foregoing the symbolism of the industrial era, it must reflect the lived realities of contemporary labour. It must move beyond the factory and into the streets, the homes, the fields, and the digital platforms where work now takes place. The future of labour is informal.
The question that remains is whether the future of justice will remain formal. This precarious economy also absorbs children, with over 10 million engaged in child labour, largely within informal sectors.
If May Day is to retain its relevance, it must do more than remember. It must confront. It must ask uncomfortable questions about the structures that produce inequality and the silences that sustain it. It must listen to the voices that are rarely heard — not because they are absent, but because they have been systematically ignored.
In the end, the struggle of informal workers is not a peripheral issue; it is the central challenge of our time. It forces us to reconsider what we mean by work, by rights, and by justice itself. And it reminds us that an economy that thrives on invisibility cannot claim to be just.
May Day must walk again — but this time, it must walk with those who have always been moving, unseen, along the margins of history. When a society begins to praise exhaustion as a virtue, it forgets the long history of those who fought simply to live as human beings.
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Ranjan Solomon is a writer, researcher and activist based in Goa. He has worked in social movements since he was 19 years of age. The views expressed here are the author’s own and Clarion India does not necessarily share or subscribe to them. He can be contacted at ranjan.solomon@gmail.com
