“Labour was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things” –
(Adam Smith, 1776)
In Guwahati, an online delivery platform worker races through traffic to meet a 10-minute deadline. In a tea garden somewhere in upper Assam, a plantation worker begins their day before sunrise. Is May Day for them?
As of April 2026, India remains a top-performing major economy, with GDP growth of around 6.5% (International Monetary Fund, 2026). Behind every service and every sector of the economy lies labour that is increasingly precarious and often invisible. Labour Day, popularly known as May Day, is observed worldwide to highlight workers’ rights and protect them from exploitation.
As workers across the world continue to labour long hours for precarious, low wages, a new Oxfam report (2026) shows that billionaire wealth grew far faster last year than in previous years. In India, despite legal protections such as the Code on Wages Act (2019), many workers, especially women, continue to earn below recommended wage levels.
The Code, which consolidates four major labour laws—the Payment of Wages Act (1936), the Minimum Wages Act (1948), the Payment of Bonus Act (1965) and the Equal Remuneration Act (1976)—seeks to universalise minimum wages and ensure timely payment.
However, the gap between legal provisions and lived realities persists, as many workers continue to face wage insecurity, informalisation and weak enforcement of labour rights.
This raises two important questions: who are today’s workers, and can economic growth alone address the structural inequalities they face? To reflect on this, consider a simple question: what did you have for breakfast or lunch today?
Behind that ordinary meal lies a chain of labour—farmers, transport workers, vendors, domestic helpers and often unpaid domestic work carried out by women within households. The last of these mostly goes unnoticed. Each stage represents a form of labour that is undervalued or underpaid. Every road we travel and every city we inhabit stands as testimony to labour that rarely finds recognition in public discourse.
Social scientist Charles Tilly (1978) discussed how social movements are important tools in the hands of ordinary citizens to bring about or block change through collective action. Historically, labour rights were advanced through such action. On 1 May 1886, workers in Chicago organised a massive strike demanding an eight-hour workday.
Three years later, the International Socialist Congress in Paris declared May 1 an International Day of Workers’ Solidarity. India observed its first Labour Day in Chennai in 1923.
Unfortunately, today, it often takes a crisis—a pandemic, an industrial accident, or the collapse of a gig worker due to heat and exhaustion—for society to acknowledge the vulnerabilities of the labouring class.
What also demands attention is that the category of “labour” today extends far beyond factory workers or those in the formal economy. It now includes gig workers, contractual staff, platform-based service providers, paid domestic workers and a wide range of workers engaged in the informal economy.
The International Labour Organization defines labour (or employment) as all activities undertaken by persons of working age to produce goods or provide services for pay or profit. It emphasises that “labour is not a commodity” (Declaration of Philadelphia, 1944), recognising work as central to human dignity, well-being and development. However, as work becomes increasingly fragmented and informalised, labour protections have not kept pace, translating into a loss of dignity for many.
Against this backdrop, Labour Day’s real significance lies in exposing the gap between India’s economic achievements and ongoing labour inequalities.
If India aspires to inclusive development, both state and society must confront how intersecting inequalities of class, caste, gender, and ethnicity limit the impact of growth.
Recognising all labour, especially that which remains unseen in informal and marginalised sectors, is essential if May Day is to reflect substantive progress—not just symbolic commemoration.
Contemporary society cannot be reduced to a simple divide between capitalists and workers, yet the concerns raised by Karl Marx in the 19th century remain strikingly relevant. This enduring relevance is reflected in the persistence of inequality despite formal commitments to equality—a paradox highlighted by Andre Beteille (1977).
This contradiction became starkly visible during the COVID-19 pandemic, when migrant Indian workers walked hundreds of kilometres back to their villages, exposing how deeply inequality is embedded in modern economic systems.
Rather than diminishing these inequalities, the changing nature of work has, in many cases, deepened and reshaped them.
Today, digital technologies have blurred the boundaries between workplace and home, while the rise of the gig and platform economy has transformed employment patterns.
India’s gig workforce has grown rapidly from about 7.7 million in 2020–21 to around 12 million by 2024–25 and is projected to reach 23.5 million by 2029–30 (ILO, 2024).
While this expansion offers flexibility, it also raises critical concerns. Many gig workers are classified as “partners” rather than employees, placing them outside the protections of labour law.
As Nick Srnicek (2016) argues, platform capitalism restructures work in ways that intensify precarity even as it creates new opportunities. At the same time, automation and artificial intelligence are reshaping labour markets, raising concerns about job displacement, digital divides and widening skill gaps.
Workers today may not form a single homogeneous class, but their struggles remain deeply interconnected.
As contemporary thinkers such as Jason Hickel (2020) and Yanis Varoufakis (2023) remind us, the global economy continues to depend on unequal labour relations.
These patterns of precarity are not limited to adult workers; they extend into the lives of children, revealing how inequality is reproduced across generations.
According to the International Labour Organization (ILO) and UNICEF, nearly 138 million children worldwide remain engaged in labour, with over 50 million in hazardous conditions (ILO & UNICEF, 2024).
In India, more than 10 million children are part of the workforce, many in informal sectors that remain invisible to regulation (Census of India, 2011).
In the Northeast, including Assam, this often takes specific forms—children assisting in tea gardens, working in roadside eateries and construction sites, in coal mines, entering domestic work in towns, or migrating with families in search of seasonal livelihoods.
For many families, survival still outweighs schooling, and childhood itself becomes a form of labour. In a country that aspires to achieve rapid economic growth and digital transformation, the continued reliance on child labour exposes a troubling contradiction.
These empirical realities—from precarious adult labour to the persistence of child labour—raise a fundamental question: whose lives does India’s celebrated growth story actually improve? And ultimately, is May Day truly for all those whose labour sustains this growth?
The vision of Viksit Bharat@2047 cannot be realised through economic expansion alone; it must ensure dignity, security and fairness for those who underpin the economy.
Only then will May Day move beyond symbolic commemoration. Let us commit to continuously questioning whose work is valued, demanding accountability from policymakers and employers, and supporting efforts to secure fair working conditions for all.
By doing so, we keep inequality, exploitation and the normalisation of precarious labour from fading into the background of everyday life.
Views expressed are that of the author and do not reflect EastMojo’s stance on this or any other issue. The author is Head of Department and Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Cotton University, Guwahati.
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