Skip to main content

Labour Day 2025


The first message I opened this morning was from friend Jose Maliekal. Happy Labour Day. That was the essence of the four images sent on WhatsApp. My instinctive response was: “Is it relevant anymore?” I drew my friend’s attention to my WhatsApp status which was the image given below. 

“May Robots do all the work soon!” That was my caption.

I’m envisaging a world in which all the laborious tasks will be carried out by robots and an International Labour Day should be dedicated to them.

My friend’s response to my questioning of the relevance of the raised Communist fist in his message was very characteristic of him: “Co-optation of the Proletariat is not equal to their Rights to Life as Species beings are granted; An Unalienated Life is realized. If Religion was the Opium, in Marx's time, the Machinations of the Market are more dangerous opiums of today. The workers need to unite, to open their eyes, to unmask the mesmerizing Doublespeak of the Market.”

My thought immediately went in this direction: India is becoming a $5-tillion-dollar economy according to the government. The country now has 205 billionaires, placing it third globally after the USA and China. India’s economy is growing by leaps and bounds. We’re gonna eradicate poverty soon. We will have affluent cities for people and palatial temples for our gods….

I go to the gate to pick up my newspapers which arrive punctually before sunrise. “India’s Shame – the trap of bonded labour.” That is one of the op-ed articles in The Hindu. What! Bonded labour in a 5-trillion-dollar economy that has a burgeoning galaxy of billionaires? My early morning dream about opulence for both humans and gods came crashing to the ground.

There are 1.84 crore [18.4 million] bonded labourers in India currently, says Rejimon Kuttappan’s Hindu article. That is, nearly twice Sweden’s population live in subhuman conditions here in our 5-trillion-dollar economy. “In addition to bonded labour,” Kuttappan goes on, “crores of unorganized Indian workers, particularly migrants, endure forced labour in India, which closely resembles bonded labour.” A very tiny fraction of India’s labourers works in the organized sector, which implies that the vast majority of them are underpaid and exploited inhumanly.

India is a rich country with too many poor people. That has become a cliché now, I know. I’m repeating it merely to remind myself that the Labour Day is still relevant. Maybe, it will always be relevant. Because the very system that creates 205 billionaires is also programmed to create 205 million impecunious labourers. In fact, the billionaires thrive on the blood and sweat of the labourers and other ‘poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’

The global economic system is unbalanced and arrogant, Pope Francis writes in his autobiography, Hope. In the Pope’s words: “An economy that kills, that excludes, that starves, that concentrates enormous wealth in a few to the detriment of many, that multiplies poverty and grinds down salaries, that pollutes, that produces war, is not an economy: It is just an emptiness, an absence, a sickness.”

Ours is a sick world. That raised fist in red colour which my friend sent me this morning in greeting is a meaningful symbol not in India alone. Poverty and exploitation of the poor is a global phenomenon.

The world stands in need of liberation,” as an old hymn says. It’s worth your while clicking on that link and listening to the hymn. 

HAPPY LABOUR DAY!

Comments

  1. Do we really need Labor Day or a promise to liberate and let the world remain a place to thrive and be creative, contributing, and productive?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Even with a day dedicated like this, nothing improves. But the day makes us think of possibilities, at least.

      Delete
  2. Exploitation of labour in the migrant, unorganised and forced labour is the shame backbone of India's Economy which aspires into the 5 Trillion Dollar range. The India of Sensex and GDP of the Billionaires danced on the Balconies.. The Bharath hit the road, sun-scorched and on bleeding feet, trekking thousands of kilometres, to the safety of their homes. The dark underbelly of Bharath. As long as there is the flesh and blood reality of Bharath, there would be World Labour Days. Robot is at the cost of humans in bondage... " Workers of the World, Unite... "

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Indeed the Covid days were a protracted nightmare for the migrant labourers particularly. It was plainly absurd that thousands of them were allowed to walk in huge crowds for hundreds of km... Why did they need a government?

      That question remains valid today too. So, you're right, workers need to put more than their hands together.

      Delete
  3. I mean the Covid-Lock Down Scenario

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hari OM
    So true that this is a global issue... all the advancements in working that were gained throughout the 20th century seem to have fallen away and even here, in 'the civilised west' we find the gap between the haves and have-nots widens. The discovery of what amounts to slave labour has been discovered in two situations here lately... yet it barely made front page news for more than a day. The world is indeed ailing just now... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It has always been a rich man's world and it continues to be so. Globalisation's promise of wealth-creation with heart failed. Only wealth now, in the hands of very few.

      Delete
  5. The struggles for fair labor practices and human dignity are far from over, how much ever advanced we might be!

    My latest post: Zoological parks

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Will that ever be over? H G Wells imagined, in his novel Time Machine, a world in which the poor labourers were driven underground by the rich overlords above ground, but the undergrounders returned with murderous fury...

      Delete
  6. The problem with a "rich" country is that the rich need the poor to sustain their wealth. The issue is income inequality. Happy Labor Day.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Income inequality is precisely the problem with the system. It creates a new caste system, so to say.

      Delete
  7. The planet has never been designed to be fair, simply evolve with or without labour. Some are able to withstand the torture, others wait for salvation and yet more seek freedom from man made economic rules.my may day was about celebrating summer the Celtic way..Beltane, the festival for calling upon the god of healing through fire.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Beltane, new to me and thanks for that.

      Manmade rules are actually only for certain privileged groups, not for all. Economic systems are no different.

      Delete
  8. That comment shows anonymous but it's Ambica

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Chhattisgarh Story

Deforestation in Chhattisgarh Kerala’s Catholic Church is teeming with rage these days because of the arrest of two nuns in Chhattisgarh on false charges. No one seems to understand the real politics behind the Modi government’s enmity towards Christian missionaries in Chhattisgarh as well as other backward states in its neighbourhood. Modi is selling the tribal areas and forestlands to the corporate sector part by part, his friend Adani being the chief benefactor. The Christian missionaries are a severe hindrance in that commerce. Let us get some facts right, at least. The Adivasi villagers allege that Gram Sabhas (local governing bodies) were forged or manipulated under pressure from Adani and the BJP government officials in order to take away their lands. In Hasdeo Aranya, minutes of the local body meetings were altered to show the villagers’ consent for land transfers. Also, the Chhattisgarh Scheduled Tribes Commission found that Panchayat secretaries were detained and coerc...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Are human systems repressive?

Salma I had never heard of Salma until she was sent to the Rajya Sabha as a Member of the Parliament by Tamil Nadu a couple of weeks back and a Malayalam weekly featured her on the cover with an interview. Salma’s story made me think on the nature of certain human systems and organisations including religion. Salma was born Rajathi Samsudeen. Marriage made her Rukiya, because her husband’s family didn’t think of Rajathi as a Muslim name. Salma is the pseudonym she chose as a writer. Salma’s life was always controlled by one system or another. Her religion and its ruthlessly patriarchal conventions determined the crests and troughs of her life’s waves. Her schooling ended the day she chose to watch a movie with a friend, another girl whose education was stopped too. They were in class 9. When Rajathi protested that her cousin, a boy, was also watching the same movie at the same time in the same cinema hall, her mother’s answer was, “He’s a boy; boys can do anything.” Rajathi was...