Essay · Section B26 September 2026

The work that holds the world together is the work no one sees.

Suraj Yadav was twenty-two, from Deoria in Uttar Pradesh, and the first person from his village to work on a commercial ship. He joined the bulk carrier MV Cape Dao on 19 August. On 23 September the ship, flying the flag of Antigua and Barbuda, was attacked in the Gulf of Oman, and he was killed. Two days later, at the United Nations, India and Liberia launched a Group of Friends on the safety and security of shipping and seafarers. External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar reminded the meeting that nearly two million seafarers operate the world’s merchant fleet and that shipping carries four-fifths of global trade. Few of the people who use the phones, fuel and fertiliser those ships carry could name a single ship or a single sailor.

In the same week, Andhra Pradesh introduced new textbooks for Classes 1 and 2 in which half of all the household chores shown are done by men: a father cooks beside the mother, men and women queue together at a public tap. The earlier books, officials said, had shown such work done entirely by women. A sailor’s death in the Gulf of Oman and a picture in a Class 1 book seem far apart, but they share one idea. The labour that keeps everything else running is usually the least seen, and it is unseen not by accident but by design: of law, of accounting and of habit. This essay argues that making such work visible is necessary but not enough. It has to be counted, protected and shared.

Consider first why the sailor is invisible. Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, a ship on the high seas answers to the state whose flag it flies, and that state is responsible for its crew’s conditions. Most of the world’s tonnage is registered under open registries, or “flags of convenience”, chosen for low fees and light oversight; Liberia runs the largest. So an Indian sailor on a Panamanian or Antiguan ship falls between two states: the one with the legal duty has little interest in him, and the one that cares has little legal standing. The world noticed this during the pandemic, when crew changes stopped and, at the peak in 2020, the International Maritime Organization estimated that some 400,000 seafarers were stranded, either stuck on board beyond their contracts or unable to join ships. In December 2020 the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution urging states to designate seafarers as key workers. In March 2021, when the Ever Given blocked the Suez Canal for six days, the world discovered again how much depended on work it never thought about.

Now consider the home. India’s first Time Use Survey, conducted by the National Statistics Office in 2019, found that women who did unpaid domestic work for their households spent about 299 minutes a day on it, against about 97 minutes for men who did such work. None of those hours enters the GDP, because the national accounts count household services produced for the family’s own use as outside the production boundary. Marilyn Waring made the argument famous in If Women Counted (1988): an economy that measures the sale of a meal but not the cooking of one will underrate the people who cook. The journalist Katrine Marçal put the same point as a question, the title of her book Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? Smith, who wrote about the butcher, the brewer and the baker, lived for most of his life with his mother, who kept his house.

Invisible work tends to become visible only when it stops. On 24 October 1975, about nine in ten women in Iceland refused to go to work, cook or look after children for a day. Offices, schools and factories struggled to function, and fathers took their children to work. Five years later Iceland elected Vigdís Finnbogadóttir as the world’s first democratically elected woman president. It was a brilliant protest, but it is a costly way for a society to learn what it owes. A sailor should not have to die, nor a household have to stop, before the rest of us notice.

The counter-position has real force. First, invisibility is sometimes a sign of success. A water supply that works, a well-run port, a competent district office: no one sees them because nothing goes wrong, and a demand that every kind of labour be celebrated could produce only noise. Second, many families regard cooking and caring as acts of affection rather than labour, and putting a price on them may seem to cheapen them; a 50:50 picture may look like an urban ideal imposed on households with very different lives. Third, visibility can be cheap. In the spring of 2020 people in Britain came out every Thursday to applaud health and care workers, and disputes over those workers’ pay and conditions followed within a few years. Applause is not a wage.

These objections do not overturn the argument; they sharpen it. Visibility is only the first of three steps that the economist Diane Elson summarised as recognise, reduce and redistribute, the framework later reflected in Sustainable Development Goal Target 5.4 on unpaid care and domestic work. Recognition means counting: regular time-use surveys and a satellite account for household production would put women’s unpaid work into official tables without pretending that love has a price. Reduction means infrastructure: piped water, clean cooking fuel and creches free more hours than any textbook can. Redistribution means changing who does the work, and this is where a Class 1 book matters, because children learn who does what from pictures long before they can read. The same picture will fail if the teacher laughs at the father at the stove, so teacher training matters as much as illustration.

For seafarers, the same steps apply. Recognition already exists on paper in the Maritime Labour Convention, 2006, the “seafarers’ bill of rights” on wages, rest, repatriation and medical care, which India has ratified. Protection has to follow: port states can inspect foreign ships for compliance, war-risk clauses and compensation should be written into every contract, and the Group of Friends will matter only if it presses flag states to accept the duties that come with the fees they collect. The Ports Ministry’s “Seafarer-First” initiative for sailors in conflict zones is a start, but it must reach insurance and contracts, not only evacuation.

The honest conclusion is not that every worker needs a monument. It is that a society should know on whose labour it depends, before a crisis teaches it. A child in Deoria who opens a Class 1 book and sees a father cooking may grow up understanding what the world has long ignored: that ordinary life rests on work done quietly, by mothers at home and by young men like Suraj Yadav on ships far away. Seeing that work is the first duty. Sharing it, and protecting those who do it, is the rest.