May Day stands as a hard-won victory of the working class. It is the historic struggle that secured the 8-hour workday. These were not concessions freely given by capitalists, but rights wrested through workers’ collective resistance, through blood, strikes, and unwavering solidarity. They are the basic rights workers fought to secure, and that we must now defend.
Today, these hard-won gains are being most brutally eroded in the Global South, where precarity has become the norm. Since the imposition of neoliberal policies by the IMF and World Bank across Global South countries in the 1980s, these gains have been systematically eroded. Deregulation, privatization, and labour flexibilization have driven economies into crisis, undermining job security and stripping away protections. What was once achieved through struggle is now being rolled back as capital seeks to extract ever-greater profit at the expense of workers’ lives.
The expansion of the informal sector – whether among domestic workers, platform drivers, or other precarious work – forces millions into unstable, unprotected conditions. At the same time, workers are being exported en masse to Global North countries as migrant labour, exposing them to rising xenophobia and racism. These serve to artificially reduce unemployment numbers at home while hiding deeper structural crises. Across these sectors, the 8-hour workday and 5-day workweek are no longer realities, but illusions. Workers are pushed to work longer, harder, and with fewer protections and rights.
This crisis is further intensified by ongoing US-led imperialist wars, waged not for any democratic ideals but for profit, benefiting oil companies, war corporations, and those shareholders who are embedded within the machinery of imperialist war policy-making. The consequences are immediate and global: surging prices of the most basic goods, deepening economic instability, and workers and toilers bearing the brunt of it. Rising living costs and stagnant wages are driving down real wages, worsening the crisis already faced by workers.
At the same time, neoliberal measures such as regressive consumption taxes further squeeze workers and the toiling people. These policies shift the source of government revenue away from big businesses and onto ordinary consumers, most of whom are workers and toilers, forcing them to pay more for basic necessities like food and electricity, while corporations continue to accumulate wealth.
This May Day, the People over Profit Network reaffirms our historical responsibility to resist, to organize, and to fight. The defence of workers’ rights demands the strengthening of our unions, workers’ associations, and grassroots organizations. It requires building militant coalitions and broad alliances capable of confronting exploitation and corporate plunder. The struggle continues, and it is only through collective action that workers and all toiling people can reclaim what has been taken and advance toward genuine liberation.