The Workers of the Workers: The Mirror We Avoid

Every 1st of May, Namibia performs a solidarity ritual. Expensive suits are pressed.

Banners rise. Luxury vehicles arrive in formation. Speeches echo across stadiums. Leaders speak of dignity, productivity, sacrifice and workers’ rights.

This year, the National Union of Namibian Workers theme is: ‘Namibian workers demand in-service training for increased productivity, national economic growth and better living conditions.’

It is a worthy demand. But it begs a question we rarely ask aloud: who trains, protects and dignifies the workers of those who speak for workers?

Behind Workers Day events lies an uncomfortable reality.

Namibia’s labour story is not only written in factories, offices and state institutions.

It is also written in private homes. In kitchens. In gardens. On farms.

In spaces where another category of worker exists, unprotected and largely invisible.

The workers of the workers.

The gardener. The domestic worker. The farmworkers.

They are rarely included in the moral imagination of Workers Day.

We speak boldly about exploitation in corporations. We demand compliance, fairness and accountability from institutions. But when labour lives inside our homes, our standards shift.

CONTRADICTIONS

We condemn low wages in public, yet negotiate wages in private with casual indifference. We demand minimum wage enforcement, yet construct exceptions domestically. Contradictions emerge.

Charity may begin at home but so does hypocrisy.

Without cushioning the answer, we must ask: are workers employed by union leaders paid in line with the standards they advocate? Do domestic workers of political and social elites receive medical care, rest days and job security?

And on Workers Day, are these workers free to rest and participate? Or are they at home, ensuring that the celebrations of labour can proceed smoothly for others?

These are not accusations. They are mirrors. We cannot demand justice in public while practising exceptions in private.

Namibia’s labour history is rooted in resistance – against dispossession, exploitation and structural inequality. That history carries moral weight. But it also carries obligations.

Principles cannot be selectively applied. When dignity depends on who the employer is, it becomes preference.

When rights are universal in speeches but conditional in practice, they become performance. We must be careful not to reproduce, within our homes and institutions, the very hierarchies we once resisted politically.

MASKS AND AUDITS

Oppression is not only structural. It is behavioural. It lives in how we value time: whose time matters, and whose can be extended without consent?

It lives in how we compensate labour: whose effort is formalised and whose is informalised?

It lives in how we distribute rest: who is entitled to it, and who must earn it endlessly?

If Workers Day is to mean anything beyond ceremony, it must extend into these spaces. Not to shame but to confront.

A gardener is not “help”. A domestic worker is not “family” unless fair wages, rest, protection and dignity are included.

Farmworkers are not passive recipients of employment, they are active contributors to the economy.

Language must align with structure. Otherwise, it becomes a mask.

Perhaps Workers Day is also an audit. A national audit of whether the values we proclaim can survive the realities we practise.

If we cannot, then what we celebrate is not justice but its appearance.

None of this diminishes the role of unions or the importance of organised labour. Their contributions remain foundational.

History does not exempt anyone from accountability. If anything, it deepens it.

However, liberation is not an event we inherit. It is a standard we must continuously apply. Including where it is inconvenient.

In homes. In gardens. In farms. In private contracts that are never publicly scrutinised.

If dignity is real, it cannot stop at the factory gate. It must cross the household threshold. It must appear in pay, in rest, access to care, everyday respect.

Otherwise, we are building a society where rights loudly defended in public are quietly diluted in private.

That contradiction does not hold. Not morally. Not socially.

FREEDOM FOR ALL

As Namibia marks another Workers Day, the most important question may be what the nation – at every level – already demands from its workers without naming it.

Freedom was never meant to only travel upward but downward too: into the hands that clean, cook, plant, build and sustain daily life.

Until it does, Workers Day remains incomplete.

Dignity is not selective, justice is not seasonal and respect is not reserved for the visible.

No country can build freedom on a foundation where some workers stand on stages, while others remain, quietly, the workers of the workers.

* Joyce Tjizu is an apartheid survivor, mother, grandmother, lay counsellor and poet.

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