Labour Day is a testament to worker importance

I was always keen to know as to why we celebrate Labour Day. It is a day in which we pay tribute to working men and women. It’s a day to celebrate achievements of workers. It is a yearly national acknowledgement to the contributions that workers have made to the strength, prosperity and well-being of a country. A country’s success and development is based on the hard work of these labourers.

The place where we live and the food that we eat every day is also the result of the hard work done by some worker in a field. They work round the clock and they have no other option left but to work in any weather just to get their daily bread and we don’t even think before putting excess food on our plates and then throwing half of that in the trash bin.

It is sad to know that most of the labourers aren’t given what they deserve. Despite their hard work, it takes a lot of effort for them to make a proper meal. In many countries, child labour is also another common issue. Governments around the world should take strict action against this as each child deserves the right to education. Governments should help those families whose children, instead of going to school, spend time working in factories, mines, hotels and fields.

While we all enjoy festivals, events or big gatherings, this is at the expense of workers. They, too, deserve some entertainment or free time. Whenever a company is launching a new type of product into the market and organise a big event for the same, we tend to just look for the name of the company. But that is not the importance of it, rather the amount of hard work that has gone into managing such an event. We need to look beyond the beauty and at the people that helped make this possible. With that in mind, I hope each and every worker of any field will get his or her right, because they truly do deserve it. Labour day should not be celebrated one just one day, but every day.

— The reader is a student based in Sharjah