The challenges of high-tech automation and globalisation in trade and commerce have put the labour-intensive developing countries on more of an unequal footing with the developed world than before. The growing trend in privatisation has created job insecurity for the traditional labour force whose co-option into modern enterprises is critically dependent on retraining. The need for social safety-net is well-recognised for the retrenched labour, but where is the wherewithal with the poorer developing countries to foot the bill?

Privatisation has set its own standards for management efficiency and demand for output from the workers. These are not bad in itself but the compensation package must be commensurate with the demands being made on workers and the wealth being created by their sweat of their brow. At the same time, the labour unrest must be curbed of their own volition as work ethics take a firm hold on the minds of workers.

This year's May Day is set against the horrendous backdrop of the house-of-cards collapse of the nine-storied garments factory laden with heavy machinery at Savar that, while killing the workers in droves, highlighted the fatal construction culture thoroughly blindfolded to lives of poor workers. The most profitable garment sector had earned a blemish of having multi-storied factories with narrow, mostly single-passage exit as a deadly trap in case of emergencies. The issue of compensation has also been brought to sharp relief by the tragedy.

The rights of workers in the agriculture sphere and those in the broader unorganised sector including the rights of domestic aides, and the whole range of daily wage earners still remain unrecognised. The exploitation of the women and child labour has often been debated; but we have a long way to go before eradicating child labour and providing the female workers with salaries equal to those of men.