Tomorrow is May Day, and somewhere in the middle of the country a couple in their early forties are opening a small bakery for the third Friday in a row, on which they have received no salary at all.
They founded the company in 2022. You took out a new mortgage on the house. They missed two of their daughter’s school plays last semester, including the one in which she had a line. You haven’t taken a day off for nineteen months. Under the official ONS labor market classification they are considered “self-employed”, which means they are not technically considered employees at all.
On this special May Day, I would like to point out that this is the case.
There is a particular sleight of hand in British political language that has led to an ever narrower definition of the word “worker” over the last fifty years or so. An employee, in today’s parlance, is someone who is paid by an employer in return for their work, ideally with a contract, a payslip and a pension contribution. The “worker movement,” in modern parlance, is the political and industrial movement that represents precisely this figure. Everyone outside the definition is implicitly something different, an entrepreneur, an investor, a self-employed person, a small business owner, a family business founder. You get different services, different sympathies, different adjectives. By and large, they are not celebrated on May 1st.
This is frankly ridiculous. The baking couple generally work more hours than any of their employees. On average, they take home less per hour than their employees. You have less vacation, less protection, less pension, less sick pay, less of everything. Your economic risk is total. Their political influence lies somewhere between negligible and non-existent. Their public image, in much of British political discourse, is more like that of the tax-avoiding nondom than that of the sympathetic NHS doorman, which, if you actually meet either, is a perfect inversion of reality.
According to the latest ONS estimate, there are just over 4.3 million self-employed people in the UK. Of these, around 600,000 operate companies with their own employees. Together they contribute around £303 billion to the UK’s GDP, which is more than the entire UK financial services sector. You pay corporation tax, dividend tax, capital gains tax, employer NICs, business tax, VAT and insurance premium tax. They keep more than three million Britons in paid jobs. They are, by any meaningful definition, the productive backbone of the country.
And for at least the last decade they have been treated with a mixture of mild, benign neglect and occasional, almost casual cruelty by each successive British government. IR35 was an atrocity. Doing taxes digitally is a cruelty. Restricting inheritance tax relief for business ownership was an atrocity. The withdrawal of various small expenses and reliefs was a cruelty. None of these things were done because someone in Whitehall really doesn’t like the small businessman; Rather, in the current political constellation, the small business owner is too small to matter, too scattered to organize, and too busy to march. The officials who write the SI get the headlines right, and the headlines are small in and of themselves.
May Day was originally a workers’ holiday, but as anyone with any knowledge of the period will tell you, the “workers” it commemorated were not exclusively the wage earners of today. They were the broader productive class: craftsmen, shopkeepers, mechanics, makers, the journeymen in the truest sense of the word, working with their own tools to produce something useful. A baker in Walsall in 2026, getting up at 4am to mix the dough, fits this older definition perfectly. The fact that it technically registered as a limited company certainly shouldn’t exclude it from the holidays.
Please don’t understand that I want to undermine the more popular version of May Day. The march, the flags, the speeches, the flag, they are part of a recognizable British political tradition that I really like. This year I just want to make a small, humble plea for the inclusion of people whose work is no less skilled, no less hard-won, no less honest and significantly less protected than the work this day was originally intended to celebrate.
So if you are in the bakery this morning, in the small workshop, in the family-run pub, in the consulting firm sitting at the kitchen table, or on the farm that has borne your name for thirty years, we wish you a happy May Day. Thanks to you, the country is doing better despite the available evidence. Take five minutes off if you can. Have a coffee. Watch the bunting. And before you go back to that, remember that the work you are doing is exactly the work of whatever the textbook says and whatever the marching song is.
