Let’s put this bluntly: The Kenyan worker has become a political pawn. While workers elsewhere move economies through industry, the only place the Kenyan worker seems to move is across the political chessboard.

The only inheritance many Kenyan workers have passed on to their children is the solidarity song“Solidarity forever.” Yet this solidarity is often one of convenience and political expedience, crafted by a clique that considers itself more enlightened than the rest of Kenya’s workers.

In Kenya, the workforce is deeply fragmented. There are those called “staff,” and then there are workers proper, the artisans, the kazi ya mkono, the machine operators, the jua kali sector. There are the “permanent and pensionable” workers who walk around with a sense of entitlement, and then there are contract workers whose sense of insecurity makes them difficult to predict.

Each group exists in its own self-contained world.

Worse still, these workers rarely know what the others earn or endure. By sustaining this opacity, the system fosters suspicion rather than unity. The solidarity song, therefore, rings hollow; no matter how loud (often off-key) it is sung, it sounds like it is being played on a keyboard whose keys are mostly broken and silent.

We are often told that Kenya’s workforce is bloated. But this accusation is rarely directed at the worker in the farm or workshop. It is aimed at the civil service, which, in many ways, has drifted into what can only be described as “evil service.” Let us be frank: for many within this educated cadre, the goal is no longer service or productivity, but personal enrichment.

This “evil service” betrays the broader workforce. It treats the ordinary worker with disdain, behaving like Napoleon’s dogs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm: well-fed, well-trained, and ever ready to suppress dissent.

At best, the so-called enlightened worker has become the sheep in Orwell’s allegory, quick to change tune as power shifts- from “four legs bad, two legs better” during the revolution, to “two legs good, four legs better” once the pigs take over the manor, the Kenyan workers’ ideals shift with convenience.

And what of today’s worker union leadership? Too often, they seem to have abandoned the role of leading from the front in the fight for workers’ rights. Instead, they have embraced a model of loud rhetoric and louder compromise. Like the pigs in Orwell’s farm, the leadership of Kenya’s workers, once elevated, immediately ceases to represent workers and instead begins to resemble their masters.

Anyone paying attention can predict what today’s May Day celebrations will be like: speeches-endless speeches that sound eerily familiar. The only noticeable variation will be the scale of self-praise, as the government attempts to portray itself as the best thing for Kenyan workers after instant coffee, perhaps citing initiatives such as the housing levy, the same levy many workers quietly resent for further straining their already thin incomes.

There will be token gestures- probably a modest salary increment for the lowest-paid workers, amounting to a few hundred shillings that will quickly get swallowed by taxes and new levies that seem to emerge with remarkable regularity under the current administration.

And after the speeches and spectacle, workers will trudge back home to the quiet anxiety of an uncertain future; back to unpaid rent and children sent home for fees barely a week into the new school term.

Meanwhile, the political noise will only grow louder as the 2027 elections approach; An election that, while offering the promise of change for the Kenyan worker, may ultimately amount to nothing more than a different set of monkeys in the same forest.

Then Labour Day will continue to be a ritual devoid of meaning for the Kenyan worker. It shall be so, until the workers’ solidarity song is sung with more sincerity, from the jua kali sheds of Kariobangi to the tea plantations of Kericho; from the boatyards of Kisumu and Mombasa to auto-garages in Thika; until smooth hands can clasp calloused ones without hesitation, until suits and ties stand shoulder to shoulder with overalls and gumboots.

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