Today is International Workers’ Day. The streets will fill with banners, the internet will bristle with solidarity posts, and someone will play The Red Flag in a town square somewhere while a local councillor tries to look moved.
I have worked for forty-six years. I am not invited.
Not officially uninvited, you understand. Nobody sends you a letter. There’s no formal ceremony where someone takes your lanyard and says thank you for your service, off you go. It just becomes apparent, gradually and then all at once, that once you retire you cease to be a Worker — capital W — and become something else. A Former Worker. A Used-To-Be. A person who did their time and now, quite reasonably, should step aside so the real workers can get on with it.
I captained ships for thirty years. I was responsible for crew, cargo, passengers, and the occasional mechanical catastrophe three hundred miles from the nearest port. I worked nights, weekends, Christmases, Bank Holidays. I worked May Days with absolutely no fanfare whatsoever. I worked through storms that would make your dentist’s waiting room feel like the Seychelles.
And now, at 67, retired for two years, I discover that I’ve been quietly reclassified. Not a worker. A burden on the pension system, possibly. A silver-haired demographic segment. A person who turns up at the GP surgery too often and watches too much daytime television.
(I watch no daytime television. I would like that on the record.)
The odd thing is that I’ve never worked harder. Running a newsletter and blog, writing six days a week, managing platforms, learning technology that would make a thirty-year-old wince. I got up at six this morning and started writing. On Workers’ Day. Without a banner or a socialist hymn in sight.
But none of that counts, apparently, because I’m not contributing to the GDP in any formally recognised way. I’m not paying National Insurance. In the great ledger of national productivity, I have been set to zero.
There’s a quiet humiliation in this that nobody warns you about. You spend decades being defined by your work — by your rank, your company, your job title, the size of the vessel under your command — and then one morning you realise those definitions have been quietly retired along with you. You are now defined by what you no longer do.
Which is strange, because I feel more purposeful now than I did at fifty-five, grinding through the final years of a career that had given everything it had to give. I feel more curious. More interested. More alive to the texture of ordinary days. Retirement didn’t make me stop working. It made me choose what to work on.
Workers’ Day is for the young and the organised and the visibly aggrieved. It’s for people with placards and collective bargaining agreements and Instagram aesthetics. It is not for a 67-year-old ex-ship’s captain in North East England, sitting at a desk at six in the morning, writing about the fact that nobody invited him.
I thought I knew what work was. Until it turned out I’d been doing it wrong the whole time by eventually stopping.
The best part of retirement is that I can now see the whole system clearly. I’m outside it. I don’t have a boss to appease or a performance review to survive. And what I see, on this particular Workers’ Day, is a celebration that has forgotten about the people who worked the longest.
Forty-six years. Not bad for someone who apparently doesn’t count anymore.
Happy Workers’ Day, everyone. I’ll be over here, working.
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