Are We Really Celebrating Workers' Day?

A Healthy Dose of Satire about Corporate Culture

This is a cross-post from LinkedIn. Enjoy.

Hey Doom Scrollers!

Today is International Labour Day. Sort of. As it happens, different countries observe it a bit differently.

France, South Africa, India? Big day—marches, speeches, real energy. Australia? Well, that depends on the state—March, May, or October. USA? They do theirs in September and call it Labour Day.

You might know it as Workers' Day because our global HR department didn't want to feel that we were advocating the Labour party and thereby making people of different political leanings feel uncomfortable. We are very committed to inclusiveness, and we have to be respectful of divergent views, you know? Because we're all so honoured, and terribly humbled, you see.

So now International Workers’ Day is a mark on our collective calendar that means many different things to different people.

Our HR department have to make their function more visible, because the slightly-anonymous satisfaction survey made it clear that they been polling poorly and they are keen to be seen as a high value function, you know, not because the Director of People and Wellness has a KPI hanging over their heads which will affect their performance bonus, but because of how important our people are, you know?

And we need to justify that line-item in the budget, of course. (If we don't spend the money this year, they will take it away from us.)

And we have just had all those recent corporate restructures, haven't we? And then there's the troubling matter of the disappointing results, which we helped you feel complicit in, and accountable for.

Then there was the deeply unfortunate business of the regrettable lay-offs the company had to make. We were deeply saddened for the 5 minutes that morning when the press release went out. Our thoughts and prayers were exceeded only by the magnanimous gesture of the outsourced outplacement support services we have generously bundled into their severance package. This will allow a stranger with no knowledge of their actual work, armed with a recycled PowerPoint and a template for “professional reinvention,” will now assist them in rewriting their LinkedIn bio—so they can courageously reframe their redundancy as an exciting pivot into the unknown that we are sure they will come to appreciate in time.

Also, we know everyone has been working so hard to really give that extra 10 per cent on top of the 110% we normalised last year, to really help the board reach their numbers, so that we can give our sacred shareholders their dividends.

And so we feel deeply, how everyone could really do with another stale synthetic show designed to virtue-signal how concerned the company wants to be seen as about the rights of workers and employees.

Yes! It's another morning tea! How lovely.

Get excited, everyone.

There will be a performative word from our Director of People and Wellness, wherein you are all expected to nod knowingly at his or her aphorisms and then give generously to the gold coin collection plate, for which we have nominated some commercially viable charity with favourable optics.

And to show you how we respect and value your dignity as adults, we're going to allow all grown-ups to wear a funny shirt, or a football jumper on the nearest Friday, so long as they don’t have client meetings—because we wouldn’t want to jeopardise our professional reputation after all.

How did we get to this?

The ideologies around the origins of Workers’ Day are multi-layered and complex, and much of it presents a clear threat to our existing fragile order. And also, we really lack the cultural language and paradigms to actually make sense or meaning of any of it without getting drawn into toxic political drama.

The day itself commemorates the labour movement, born from industrial-era struggle, solidarity, and sacrifice. It emerged out of unionisation efforts, workers’ strikes, and uprisings—especially the fight for an eight-hour workday, most famously in the Haymarket Affair in Chicago, 1886. It is soaked in the rhetoric of socialism, communism, collective bargaining, and the uncomfortable truth that progress was not granted; it was taken.

Which is... awkward.

Because corporations have no language for this, we don't have any formal functions to process this reality. Most of the modern business culture is one of performative humility and cult-like congeniality that we normalise under the banner of "professionalism". This professional culture is predicated on a social contract of not talking about the elephant in the room, ever.

If you are like me, you have seen what happens when someone breaches that unspoken protocol. When someone dares to name the thing.

If you do not allow yourself to be called to heel when the loyalty test is invoked, if you do not acquiesce to the official party line, you get the look. That tight frown. That implied 'how dare you'. And the unspoken: 'now you’ve gone and bitten the hand…'

And it is not that anyone is wicked, exactly.

It is simply that Business, as a culture, is unprepared. Unprepared in its language. Unprepared in its psychology. Unprepared in its maturity.

We are all uninitiated.

We cannot acknowledge the history of Labour Day, because it implies legitimacy to organised labour, to unionisation, to the idea that workers might want to unite at all. And that is a very awkward thing to be seen endorsing or encouraging, especially by the people whose job it is to protect "the culture."

Why?

Well, for various reasons we do not fully understand, and then also for one reason that we do: Because if workers need to unite, it implies that something is wrong. That someone is not listening. That power is not being shared. It speaks of inequity, unfairness, neglect, exploitation and ultimately abuse.

Any situation where lower classes are Necessary but unappreciated is a situation that is not stable. Systems that are not mutually supportive are not stable or sustainable.

This conversation cannot happen in a company town hall forum.

We don’t know how to talk about this bizarre feudal class culture of the modern workplace, we don't know how to make room for this human necessity that left such a mark on the collective human psyche that we created an international day to honour it, because we cannot fully honour it without exposing the inconvenient reality of our existing structures of status, class and remuneration.

We can't honour it too loudly, so we have to neuter it, and put a nice clean sanitising wrapper around it, and shoe-horn it into the 'safe' mode of corporate liturgy, a performative acknowledgement, like we do with the 'Welcome to Country' in Australia.

An organisation or community that does not know how to ritualise its own disruption will eventually suffer a death of meaning.

So What Do We Do?

We begin, at least, by acknowledging to ourselves that there has to be a better way.

We have to sit with the discomfort of realising that no one, and then paradoxically everyone, is to blame, actually.

Cults are dysfunctional not because of what the leaders say or do, but because of how the group normalises it. The danger is not in the behaviour itself, but in the collective agreement to look away, to pretend it is fine, to punish those who break the spell.

Corporate culture, at scale, functions the same way. It normalises silence. It glosses over contradiction. It trades plain speech for euphemism and disincentivises dissent. What makes it dangerous is how effectively it convinces people that there is nothing to see here.

We have to sit with the discomfort of accepting that we have been complicit in normalising this, and that somewhere deep inside we knew it was bullshit and we played along.

Here is my advice:

1. Name what is happening. Noticing problems and naming problems are very closely tied. Fred Rogers said, "Everything human is mentionable and everything mentionable is manageable." If you cannot name it, you cannot deal with it. The ability to address any problem effectively is limited precisely by the ability to name it accurately, even if privately. What unflattering language best describes your work culture or your visceral reaction to it?

2. Stop Being ashamed of Feeling this Way. Making a topic taboo is how any abusive culture transfers its lack of dignity onto individuals in the form of Shame. It is NO mark of wellness to be well adjusted to a dysfunctional norm.

3. Reach Outside the Frame. Dysfunctional cultures distort reality. If we orient ourselves to other life projects such as personal fulfilment, spiritual wellness or wholesome relationships, we get frames of reference, appropriate language and models of behaviour that we can refer to, to help us discern areas of misalignment in our work cultures, and inform us what better might look like.

4. Find a way to exercise small, constructive acts of courage and leadership. You don't need to throw yourself on your sword for a cause. You can just become the person whom people feel safe having a real conversation with. You can lead with better questions, refusing to pretend not to notice. You can hold a small line, not to cause trouble, but because you can no longer be complicit in the self-betrayal.

5. Seek initiation. There is a long-standing tradition, a human technology, dedicated to safeguarding, curating, and steering collective culture, especially through phases of transition and disruption. Its function is to ensure a balance between our levels of empowerment and our capacity to exercise that empowerment wisely. This is called initiation. And who is facilitating that initiation, and with what intention, matters.

For me, this is the kind of frank talk, the kind of advice I would have wanted, so I trust you will find something of real sense-making and meaning in this. I have a lot more to say on this, and I am doing it so that we can realise a better way, so that we can live a life by design, not by default.

Let me know what you think. More importantly, let me know how this makes you feel.

Let's keep this conversation going, and feel free to pull me into such conversations online, here on LinkedIn and elsewhere.

Happy Workers' Day.

Rocco