A May Day distress call

Around the world uncertainty is becoming the single unifying characteristic of working life. And for anyone who's not independently wealthy, uncertainty about work means uncertainty about everything.

It's been over a generation since we were told about the end of the job for life. Now people are uncertain about whether they'll have a job at all, whether they'll get a pension at the end of their working lives, and whether their kids will grow up – as every parent wants – to be healthier, wealthier and wiser than them.

Far too many people across the globe – from rich countries like the UK to developing ones in sub-Saharan Africa – are making money out of the uncertainty working people are forced to endure.

Take, for example, those running our financial institutions. Many of them are once again picking up their seven-figure bonuses while the global dole queue they helped to cause hits 35 million. If it wasn't for the taxes of you and me, their banks would have gone bust months ago. It cannot be right that hedge funds are making huge profits from speculation over Greece's future while ordinary workers face having their pay, jobs, pensions and public services slashed.

Uncertainty at work goes further than pay cuts and job insecurity. Consider the outright criminals who pay below the minimum wage in Britain, no wage at all in parts of India, employ children who should be at school, or hire death squads to terrorise the trade unionists standing up for their workmates in places like Guatemala or Colombia.

Uncertainty is the main challenge facing people working in the global economy.

People don't know when they're suddenly going to discover their employer is upping sticks and relocating to the other side of the world. People wake up not knowing whether there will be work for them today, or whether their zero-hours contract will mean another day waiting for the phone to ring. And three days after Workers' Memorial Day, people don't even know whether their employer cares enough so that they come home at all at the end of a hard day's work.

Workers in Europe still have a welfare state, rights at work and – for many – a union to protect them from all that uncertainty. And while they still face risks at work, workers in developing countries often face this uncertainty completely unprotected.

Today, tens of millions of people around the world will go to work in someone else's home as a domestic worker. Even in Europe these people are excluded from protections like health-and-safety legislation. Many of them around the world are underage, overworked and prey to brutal employers who think nothing of abusing and sexually harassing the people who clean their clothes and care for their children.

But May Day is not just a distress call. It is also a day for celebrating what people are doing to challenge uncertainty and face the future, instead, with confidence and hope.

May Day belongs to people like Sonu Danuwar, the 18-year-old leader of the Nepalese domestic workers' union who is looking forward to attending the UN's International Labour Conference this June for the beginning of the debate on a new global convention on domestic workers' rights.

If she can take control of her life and campaign for a better deal for herself and people just like her, then the future may not be quite so bleak after all.