Today, May 1, is International Labour Day. New Delhi: Meena* welcomes the heat and yet laments its crippling impact on her work and health at the same time. In a narrow lane in Harkesh Nagar, Delhi, she spends her days rolling papads by hand, laying them out in the sun to dry and delivering fresh batches each week to a local trader. The sun is essential to her livelihood. But the heat that aids her work has worsened over the years.When temperatures rise, her one-room home which doubles as a workspace and living area becomes unbearable. By the time the sun reaches its peak, Meena has already shifted her workspace three times: first, from the corner of her ten-by-ten-foot room, where the tin roof traps heat like a sealed vessel, to the narrow platform outside her door, a chabutra barely wide enough for two people, and back inside again, without any respite. Inside, it can get hotter than 45° celsius. “It’s like working in a pressure cooker,” Meena says.Meena is not alone. Home-based workers are the Delhi’s most invisible labour force. Women who stitch garments for global fashion supply chains, pack bindis and toys, cut thread, embroider and string garlands; all from homes that double as bedrooms, kitchens and factory floors. According to 2022/23 National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) data, there are more than five lakh home-based workers in Delhi, a majority of them women. Their labour is woven into the city’s economy, and yet, the city’s infrastructure has never been designed with them in mind.As India faces longer, hotter summers, what were once seasonal hardships — inadequate housing, unreliable water, erratic electricity, clogged drains — have become permanent crises. Where Delhi’s heat is the most intense Delhi’s home-based work (HBW) clusters are concentrated in the city’s northern and eastern edges, the same areas that consistently register as the hottest on surface temperature maps. Dense informal settlements and proximity to small-scale industry intensify the urban heat island effect, pushing temperatures well above the city average. In Rajiv Nagar, an unauthorised colony, houses press so tightly together that daylight barely reaches the lanes. In New Ashok Nagar, multi-storey constructions choke what little air might otherwise circulate. In Mustafabad, rooftop temperatures as high as 50 degrees celsius have been recorded during peak summer. Nevertheless, inside these spaces, five to eight family members live, sleep and work. For home-based workers, the home is their primary productive asset. A cramped space hampers productivity. There is no room to store raw materials for bulk orders, no separation between the demands of their public and private live with other household members and activities competing for the same space and issues such as poor ventilation and irregular basic services enhancing occupational health risks. Also read: Heatwave Across India to Abate Soon But Leaves Trail of Deaths, Power Demand Hits Record PeakWorking through power cutsIn Jahangirpuri, transformer failures are routine in summer, with outages stretching from hours into days. In Rajiv Nagar, even when the supply returns, the density of the built environment shuts out natural light, making fine embroidery work nearly impossible without artificial lighting. Delhi’s electricity subsidy applies to households consuming under 200 units a month, but only for registered consumers. Most home-based workers are tenants, relying on sub-metered connections controlled by landlords. The subsidy rarely reaches them. Instead, landlords pocket the benefit while tenants pay market rates, often Rs 8-10 per unit. In New Ashok Nagar, women deliberately use low-wattage bulbs to avoid monthly bills from running up to Rs 500 -700, even as the dim light strains their eyes and slows output. Water: Hours spent, hours lostIn a home where water is scarce and unpredictable, the burden of managing it falls to women. For the home-based workers, every hour spent hauling water up the stairs, waiting for a tanker or sprinkling the floor to keep the room cool is an hour spent not earning. The time spent on collecting water represents an opportunity cost with high and immediate stakes. Piece rates for zari and embroidery run between Rs. 2 and 4 per piece. To earn Rs. 150 to 200 a day, a worker must produce several hundred units. Mustafabad, home to around two lakh people, has very poor piped water supply. Residents pool resourced to install shared submersible pumps; families on upper floors pay more, sometimes up to Rs. 90 a month. In Nand Nagari, supply can disappear entirely for a month at a time. beyond lost working hours, the shortage makes basic hygiene difficult, raising health risks in already cramped quarters. Sanitation and the gendered cost of access Moreover, the sanitation crisis is deeply gendered. In parts of Jahangirpuri, women walk up to ten minutes to reach shared toilets, travelling through lanes that are difficult to navigate by day and unsafe after dark. In Harkesh Nagar, eight to twelve families may share a single toilet on a floor. The absence of private sanitation does not only impact comfort or dignity, it shapes where women can go, how long they can stay out, and ultimately how much they are able to work. In areas where drains are perpetually clogged and wastewater management is poor, the problem only deepens. Also read: How Well Do You Know Your Heatwave? A Study of India DataThe cost of copingThe cost of coping with heat, water shortages, power cuts and the rising cost of cooling equipment like coolers, fans, umbrellas, and drinking water are borne entirely by the workers themselves. There is no sick leave, no compensation for inhabitable work environments and no employer legally obligated to provide relief. Heat-related illnesses adds medical expenses to an already strained budget. Almost all informal workers, including home-based workers, are not covered by health or heat insurance. As income costs fall and rise, these women can spiral into debt, losing whatever assets they have accumulated.The COVID-19 pandemic provided a glimpse of how catastrophic this invisibility under the system can be, with home-based workers’ income remaining close to zero for over a year, and no sector-specific governmental scheme looking out for them. They were among the hardest hit informal sector in Delhi.A city that does not see themAs these workers are not recognised, their workplaces are classified as residences, not workplaces, leading to infrastructure deficit in settlements being coded as a housing, poverty or settlement regularisation problem, instead of shortcomings of adequate labour and climate policy. Rising temperatures and extreme weather events are not isolated threats but part of a broader context involving socioeconomic disparities, health implications, and infrastructure deficiencies. Researchers and worker organisations have laid out clear demands: include home-based workers in labour surveys, create shared, well-ventilated workspaces, ensure electricity subsidies reach tenants and guarantee reliable piped water. To address this, cities need to change how they think about work and how they build resilience. They argue that urban planning and Heat Action Plans must explicitly incorporate home-based workers, and that workers should play an active role in shaping these responses.The fact that urban informal workers use their homes for more purposes than shelter must be recognised as well as reflected in climate justice debates. For Delhi’s home-based workers, better living and working conditions are not merely a matter of labour rights but also a matter of dignified survival.Research cited in this article draws on field documentation from seven home-based worker clusters in Delhi — Jahangirpuri, Rajiv Nagar, Mustafabad, Sunder Nagari, Nand Nagari, New Ashok Nagar and Harkesh Nagar — conducted by WIEGO.Shalini Sinha is home-based work sector specialist and Asia Strategy lead at WIEGO.Rituraj Pegu is the Research and Coordination Officer for WIEGO’s Climate Justice and the Urban Informal Economy project in Delhi.*Name changed to protect identity.