Every 1st May, like clockwork, Uganda joins the rest of the world to honour workers, by ensuring the actual workers stay hard at it, while officials in crisp suits wave to the cameras and give speeches on “dignity” and “solidarity” from the comfort of shaded tents. It’s a national holiday that’s anything but for the vast majority who make the wheels turn.
Labour Day was never meant to be a photo op. It began with blood, sweat, and real struggle, think 1886 Chicago, the Haymarket Affair, and the radical demand for an 8-hour workday. But as with many good ideas, it has since been softened, polished, and served lukewarm by those who no longer need to fight for what they already have. Meanwhile, the global economy has changed the rules, labour is now gig-based, informal, or just unpaid, but the speeches haven’t changed since the 60s.
Take the United States and Canada, for example. They were so uncomfortable with the revolutionary energy of 1st May that they shifted their Labour Day to September, rebranding it as a safe, family-friendly picnic rather than a worker revolt. The result? A celebration of labour with almost no labour politics in sight. Genius.
Back home in Uganda, the event is still on the May Day schedule, but let’s not kid ourselves. Who actually celebrates Labour Day here? Not the boda rider weaving through potholes, not the domestic worker watching her employer post ‘Happy Labour Day’ on WhatsApp, and certainly not the informal trader whose stall was just razed for “city beautification.” It’s mostly civil servants, politicians, and a few well-dressed union leaders who get the honour of pretending the worker is thriving.
The issues at the heart of the day, fair wages, decent work, union rights, and an 8-hour day, have quietly packed up and left the building. In today’s Uganda, 8-hour shifts are a dream. Most people juggle multiple hustles from dawn till well after dusk, not because they love hard work, but because rent, school fees, and airtime don’t pay themselves. As for trade unions, they exist, on paper. About 15% of Uganda’s workforce is unionised, which sounds respectable until you realise that most Ugandans work in the informal sector, where union presence is about as common as a lunch break. It’s a bit of irony, really: we have unions, just not where most workers are found. Like building a hospital in a shopping mall, impressive, but oddly misplaced.
So yes, Labour Day has been hijacked. Not by the workers, but by the rulers, who use it to issue promises and platitudes, maybe throw in a minimum wage discussion for good measure, then proceed with business as usual. It has become a classic case of tokenism: a ritual that pays lip service to justice while doing very little to challenge the status quo.
Still, the core principles, dignity, solidarity, justice, are more relevant than ever. Only now, solidarity must stretch beyond factory floors. It must include digital gig workers, climate-displaced farmers, care workers, and the millions who toil in the informal shadows. It must also ask uncomfortable questions: How did we normalise working like machines while earning like peasants? Who decided a human being’s worth should be measured in daily wages that barely cover lunch?
Labour Day deserves better. Not because of nostalgia, but because workers and real workers deserve more than tired slogans. Perhaps the most honest way to honour the day is not through another conference or parade, but by refusing to normalise exploitation, by listening to those still excluded, and by daring to imagine a system where work pays, and life thrives.
Until then, Happy Labour Day, if you’re lucky enough to afford one.