By Muhammad Mohsin Iqbal
May 1 arrives each year with the predictable rhythm of ritual. Across continents, it is marked as a public holiday, a symbolic pause in the machinery of work that is itself built and sustained by workers. In cities from Karachi to Paris, Jakarta to São Paulo, the day unfolds in familiar patterns: rallies that gather in prescribed spaces, banners lifted high with slogans that have changed little over decades, speeches delivered from makeshift stages or polished conference halls, and official statements reaffirming a commitment to labor rights that is often more rhetorical than real.
There is a theatre to it now, almost universally recognized. The language is urgent, even militant in tone. Calls for dignity, fairness, and protection against exploitation echo through loudspeakers and televised broadcasts. “Workers of the world, unite” is repeated with a historical reverence that sometimes obscures how little the material conditions of many workers have actually shifted. By evening, the speeches fade, the crowds disperse, and the machinery of everyday economic life resumes its familiar grind. What remains is the question that rarely survives the day’s ceremonies: whether symbolic recognition has ever been enough to alter structural reality.
To speak of “the worker” as a single category is already to simplify a far more complex social landscape. Too often, public imagination still confines the term to manual labor: the factory worker on assembly lines, the construction laborer balancing steel and cement, or the agricultural hand bent over soil under an unforgiving sun. These are, without question, central figures in the story of labor. However, they are not the whole story.
A more honest definition stretches much further. The worker is also the office employee navigating endless digital systems long after official hours have ended, the teacher improvising lessons in overcrowded classrooms with limited resources, the nurse managing exhaustion across double shifts, the journalist pursuing fragile truths in environments that are often financially and physically insecure, the driver weaving through congested streets for unpredictable income, the shopkeeper balancing survival against rising costs, the freelancer whose work dissolves geographical boundaries but not economic precarity. In every case, what defines the worker is not the visibility of effort, but the exchange of time, skill, and energy for remuneration that is increasingly difficult to reconcile with the cost of living.
It is here that the contradiction becomes most visible. Inflation does not pause for commemorative days. Prices continue their steady ascent: food, fuel, rent, electricity, education, healthcare. Against this backdrop, wages in many sectors remain stubbornly static. The result is not simply economic strain but a slow erosion of dignity. A day’s labor that once ensured stability now often guarantees only partial survival. Households adjust not by improving their circumstances but by reducing their expectations—smaller meals, deferred medical treatment, interrupted education, and a constant reliance on credit that deepens vulnerability over time.
Nowhere is this contradiction more apparent than in sectors that rely on public trust yet fail to secure internal fairness. In parts of the media industry, for example, those who document inequality often experience it directly. Journalists and production staff may work irregular hours, respond to unpredictable demands, and face delayed or fragmented payments that undermine financial security. The irony is not subtle: those who report on labor rights frequently struggle to access them themselves. It creates a quiet dissonance within institutions that publicly advocate accountability while privately normalizing precarity.
Against this backdrop, May Day increasingly risks becoming a carefully staged performance of concern rather than a mechanism of change. Political leaders speak of dignity and justice in language that is polished and familiar, while the material realities of workers remain largely unchanged. The symbolism is not without value, but symbolism alone cannot substitute for enforcement. Applause, however sincere, does not index wages. Speeches, however powerful, do not guarantee contracts. Recognition without regulation risks becoming an annual ritual that comforts conscience without altering conditions.
If May 1 is to retain meaning beyond ceremony, it must move from symbolic recognition to enforceable obligation. That shift requires more than goodwill. It demands structural intervention: wages that are aligned with inflation rather than fixed in stagnation, timely payment enforced through credible legal consequence, and institutional frameworks capable of addressing grievances without procedural delay. It also requires extending labour protections into sectors that remain partially or wholly informal, where vulnerability is highest and oversight weakest.
In Islamic teaching, the instruction to pay the worker before his labor is “dry” is frequently cited not as metaphor but as principle: immediacy in justice, not deferred appreciation. Yet the gap between principle and practice remains wide in many contemporary systems. Ultimately, the question May Day raises is not whether societies value work in theory, but whether they are willing to translate that valuation into measurable reality. The persistence of inequality suggests that admiration for labor has not yet been matched by structural commitment to those who perform it. Until that alignment occurs, May 1 will remain suspended between meaning and ritual: a day that speaks eloquently of justice while quietly revealing how far that justice still has to travel.
(The writer is a parliamentary expert with decades of experience in legislative research and media affairs, leading policy support initiatives for lawmakers on complex national and international issues, and can be reached at editorial@metro-Morning.com)
