By Janakie Seneviratne –

Janakie Seneviratne

Observed globally as International Workers’ Day and rooted in the historic struggles symbolized by the Haymarket Affair, May Day is usually seen as a celebration of workers’ rights and labour solidarity. However, the idea of “the worker” has never been completely neutral or universal. In practice, it has often been based on a male, industrial, and formally employed worker.  This has meant that one type of male work was treated as the standard, while many other forms of work—such as informal, precarious, migrant, and unpaid labour—have been made less visible in mainstream labour discussions.

Yet, when viewed through a feminist lens, particularly in the Sri Lankan context, it reveals a far more complex landscape—shaped not only by gendered labour hierarchies, unpaid care work, and the persistent invisibility of women’s contributions, but also by the deepening pressures of neoliberal economic restructuring and austerity. 

In Sri Lanka’s plantation sector, generations of Tamil women tea pluckers continue to sustain a vital export industry under conditions of low wages, limited mobility, poor housing and entrenched structural inequality. In the Free Trade Zones, young women workers in the garment industry very often form the backbone of export-led growth, yet remain constrained by long working hours, production pressures, living standards and limited bargaining power. Alongside them are Sri Lanka’s foreign domestic migrant women workers—who embody one of the clearest examples of globalised gendered labour: they are wage earners, primary caregivers from afar, and financial sustainers of entire households, often simultaneously.

However, a fuller understanding of women’s labour in Sri Lanka must also include the vast informal sector, where women work as street vendors, agricultural labourers, domestic helpers, small-scale producers and many others.  These women are often paid daily wages without contracts, without job security, and without access to social protection mechanisms such as pensions, maternity benefits, or health insurance. Their economic survival depends on precarious and fluctuating income, leaving them especially vulnerable to inflation, debt cycles, and economic shocks.

In the context of neoliberal austerity—marked by public spending cuts, subsidy reductions, and shrinking welfare provision—this vulnerability is further intensified, as households increasingly absorb costs that were once partially socialized by the state. Despite their centrality to household survival and local economies, their labour remains systematically undercounted and politically under-recognized.

Feminist political economy highlights that women’s labour cannot be understood solely through paid employment. It is structured through what can be described as three interconnected roles:

Reproductive labour: unpaid care work within households, including childcare, eldercare, cooking, and domestic maintenance; Productive labour: paid work in factories, plantations, services, and informal markets; Community labour: unpaid or underpaid work that sustains social networks, local economies, and community wellbeing, often performed through collective support systems, informal caregiving, and social reproduction at the neighborhood level.

These overlapping responsibilities form what is often called the “triple burden,” disproportionately carried by women across class and sector in Sri Lanka. Under conditions of neoliberal austerity, this burden expands further, as cuts to public services such as healthcare, education, and social protection effectively shift additional unpaid care responsibilities onto women and households.

Karl Marx’s insight that labour is central to the production of value remains relevant, particularly his observation that “labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and nature participate.” Yet Marxist analysis, while foundational, did not fully account for the gendered architecture of labour reproduction. However Lenin recognized the social importance of unpaid domestic labour, but he did not develop a full theory of “unpaid care work” in the way contemporary feminist economics does.

In his writings—especially after the Russian Revolution—Vladimir Lenin did argue that women’s domestic burden was a key barrier to equality and that socialism should socialize household labour (through public kitchens, childcare, laundries, etc.). He saw these tasks as part of what kept women tied to the home and therefore unequal in society.

Feminist theorists have since extended this critique to show that unpaid and underpaid reproductive labour is not external to capitalism but fundamental to its functioning—becoming even more visible under neoliberal regimes as in Sri Lanka that rely on the privatization of care and the compression of social welfare.

Kimberlé Crenshaw, helps us understand how different forms of inequality overlap. It shows that gender-based labour exploitation is shaped not only by gender, but also by class, ethnicity, migration status, and whether people live in rural or urban areas. In Sri Lanka, this means plantation workers, Free Trade Zone workers, migrant domestic workers, and informal sector workers all face different kinds of hardship. But they are also connected by common conditions such as low income, economic insecurity, strict economic policies, and social invisibility.

Ultimately, a feminist reading of May Day demands more than symbolic recognition. It calls for structural transformation: formal recognition of informal labour, legal protection for daily-wage workers, redistribution of unpaid care work, and labour policies that reflect the full spectrum of women’s contributions to the economy and society. In this sense, May Day is not only a commemoration of past struggles, but a continuing demand to confront how neoliberal austerity deepens gendered inequalities while relying on women’s labour—visible and invisible alike—to sustain both households and the nation itself.