When The Heat Rises, The Workers Fall: Why Climate Justice Must Begin with Labour

This May Day, as the world paused to honour workers’ struggles and solidarity, a new front in the fight for justice emerged in Delhi—one that connects the everyday realities of informal labour to the escalating climate crisis. At Triveni Kala Sangam on May 1, a coalition of informal workers, trade unionists, and environmental organisations like Greenpeace India joined hands with counterparts from Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bangladesh to launch the Workers’ Collective for Climate Justice—South Asia. This alliance is more than symbolic. It brings together voices from across South Asia to forge a regional response to the climate crisis grounded in the lives of the working poor.

As we now mark World Environment Day, the launch becomes even more urgent and relevant. It reminds us that the planet’s future hinges not only on protecting ecosystems but also on recognising and uplifting the labour of those who live closest to environmental breakdown—waste pickers, street vendors, rickshaw pullers, and domestic workers. The climate emergency is not just about melting glaciers or rising sea levels, it is about livelihoods lost, bodies overburdened, and futures rendered precarious by extreme heat and erratic weather.

Alongside the launch, participating groups signed onto the Polluters Pay Pact, a global campaign that calls on governments to impose new taxes on fossil fuel corporations. It is a direct call for climate accountability from those most responsible—and for climate justice to be led by those most affected.

At the heart of the launch was a sobering report titled Ground Zero: Climate Experiences among Informal Workers in Delhi, released by Greenpeace India. Based on qualitative research, the report centres the everyday realities of informal workers navigating a city increasingly marked by climate unpredictability and urban precarity. The findings speak not only to a crisis of environmental collapse but also to a crisis of care, labour, and dignity.

Ground Zero: Climate Impacts on Delhi’s Informal Workers

The report brings forth the stories and statistics from the city’s streets—where heat, rain, and rising uncertainty have become daily adversaries for millions. Street vendors, waste pickers, domestic workers, and rickshaw pullers, who make up the informal spine of Delhi’s economy, are being hit the hardest.

The study shows that Delhi’s informal workforce, which comprises around 80 per cent of the city’s working population, including 82 per cent of working men and 76 per cent of working women, lacks basic protections. They work without legal recognition, without social security, and increasingly, without shelter from the growing climate crisis. For every 1°C increase in temperature, informal workers’ earnings fall by up to 19 per cent, with heatwaves slashing incomes by as much as 40 per cent. Simultaneously, medical expenses spike by about 14 per cent, painting a bleak picture of the climate-health-economic nexus.

Delhi alone is home to over 400,000 street vendors, 200,000 waste pickers, 500,000 domestic workers, and 500,000 rickshaw pullers, many of whom work outdoors under brutal conditions, without access to clean water, cooling spaces, sanitation, or shade.

Street vendors are pushed into crowded pavements and flood-prone streets. Even makeshift tarpaulin shades, once their only refuge from heat, are now criminalised as “encroachments.” Rickshaw pullers, constantly surveilled, are forced to rest in exposed areas. Waste pickers, especially women, segregate waste in open, scorching corners or their cramped homes, with segregation centres (dhalaos) often shut in the name of “cleanliness.”

These are not isolated inconveniences—they are structural exclusions that climate change is rapidly worsening.

Gendered Heat: Women Carry the Heaviest Climate Burden

The climate crisis doesn’t just add another burden for women in informal work—it intensifies every existing one. Whether it’s vending on sun-baked pavements, picking waste, walking miles for domestic jobs, or pulling double shifts in others’ kitchens and their own, women’s days stretch across paid and unpaid labour with no reprieve.

A domestic worker shared: “While cooking, they (the employers) turn off the fan, and it becomes unbearable.”

The heat doesn’t pause when the workday ends. Women return home to cook, clean, fetch water, care for children and elders—all under deep physical exhaustion. During heatwaves and floods, they shoulder even more: from securing food and water to protecting children in overcrowded, under-resourced neighbourhoods.

Many avoid drinking water throughout the day just to reduce trips to unsafe or paid public toilets. This leads to chronic dehydration, urinary tract infections, and other heat-related illnesses—a silent epidemic that hits poor women the hardest, and is almost always undocumented.

Climate shocks also amplify gendered violence and control. Employers regulate fans, water access, and rest breaks, while women bear the brunt of this control silently because speaking up risks job loss, eviction, or worse. For women, climate breakdown is not only about rising temperatures, it’s about shrinking dignity.

Caste is Not Incidental, It’s Central

Marginalised caste groups are overrepresented in the most precarious and climate-exposed jobs. According to the 2022–23 Periodic Labour Force Survey, more than 40–50 per cent of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe workers are engaged in informal work. The link between caste, informality, and climate vulnerability is neither accidental nor new but is foundational.

Waste pickers, many from Dalit communities, are denied entry into housing societies, barred from segregated waste points, and refused even basic sanitation infrastructure. Their labour maintains the city’s cleanliness, but they remain invisible in policy, in governance, and in recovery. This exclusion isn’t just economic; it is caste-based, and justified through rituals of pollution and hierarchy.

When climate disasters strike, it is these workers who bear the costs of recovery—working through illness, heatstroke, and unsafe spaces, often without even the vocabulary to name their suffering as climate injustice.

Workers Demand Climate Accountability

While global climate finance debates drag on in international forums, adaptation costs are growing on the ground. The report calls for urgent and specific adaptation measures for workers like cooling shelters, paid rest breaks, accessible sanitation, and protection from evictions.

But more than adaptation, workers are demanding accountability. That’s where the Polluters Pay Pact steps in—not as symbolism, but as an enforceable demand. It calls on governments to tax fossil fuel corporations and billionaires whose profits have soared at the cost of ecological collapse. That money must fund community-led, inclusive adaptation solutions.

This May Day, Delhi’s informal workers made it clear: the path to a sustainable, liveable future will not come from boardrooms or closed-door climate summits. It will come from workers organising, resisting, and reimagining survival from the ground up. A just climate transition must be led by the working class. Anything else is neither just, nor a transition.

As we mark World Environment Day, it is essential to recognise that environmental solutions cannot be separated from the lives and labour of the working poor. Waste pickers, domestic workers, street vendors, and rickshaw pullers are not just climate victims—they are environmental actors, sustaining cities through invisible care and ecological labour. But their contributions remain unrecognised, their rights unmet. True environmental justice will not come from top-down pledges alone. Rather it must be shaped by those whose bodies bear the brunt of both environmental degradation and economic exploitation. Climate justice, in its fullest sense, begins with labour justice.

(Anjali Chauhan is a PhD Research Scholar, Department of Political Science, University of Delhi)