Invisible and Unprotected: India’s New Labour Codes Fail Domestic, Home-Based Workers

On a blistering afternoon in June, when the temperature had crossed 40 degrees Celsius, 48-year-old Manju (name changed on request) was at home in the dense Mewla Maharajpur locality. She wanted a few minutes of rest before heading out to work as a domestic worker. But the ceiling fan in the room, recirculating hot air, was not helping her cool down. Dreading the blazing sun, Manju reminded herself that it was only a 20-minute-walk to her employer’s home, and that she had been doing this for decades.A few minutes into the walk, she knew something was terribly wrong.“I began to feel overwhelming thirst, followed by a parched throat and nausea. I sat on the side of the road and managed to get drinking water from someone nearby,” she said. Manju’s symptoms indicate that she may have experienced heat exhaustion that arises due to the body's response to an excessive loss of water and salt, usually through profuse sweating. Yet, she did not return home. “I felt guilty about not showing up for work,” said Manju.India’s four new labour codes, which replaced 29 Union government labour laws, have a blindspot when it comes to protecting workers from the impacts of climate change, as we reported in the first part of our series. The other four parts of this series investigated how women in the manufacturing sector, street vendors, small-site construction workers and gig workers, fall through the labour code protections, leaving them vulnerable to impacts of climate change.Extreme climate has particular impacts on women workers, who juggle work with caregiving responsibilities at home, as we reported in the first part of our series. Safe working conditions, provisions such as paid sick leave, health insurance, maternity benefits, income support during climate disasters, access to cooling infrastructure, and bargaining power, can help shield women workers from climate risks.Ellina Samantroy Jena, a Fellow at the V.V. Giri National Labour Institute, an autonomous body of the Ministry of Labour and Employment, explained that domestic and home-based work are low-paying. Domestic work involves performing various tasks, such as cleaning or sweeping, and home-based workers are involved in a variety of occupations, including metal work, zari (embroidery) work, carpentry, bangle making, papad making.The Code on Social Security, 2020, which extends social security to all employees and workers in the organised, unorganised or any other sector, classifies domestic and home-based workers as wage workers, meaning those employed for remuneration in the unorganised sector, directly by an employer or through a contractor.But domestic and home-based workers’ “vulnerability lies in that they are not employed in establishments (units where 10 or more workers are employed), where legal conditions can be extended,” Jena said. Homes, she added, are not recognised as workplaces for domestic and home-based workers in the labour code. This makes the labour codes, and its welfare provisions, inadequate for most such workers.Unregulated working conditionsThe Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code or OSH Code, 2020, is applicable to persons employed in an establishment.While the Code mandates that employers of a factory provide a suitable atmosphere, enough air circulation, and protect workers from excessive heat, cold and extreme weather, Subhadra Pandey, Coordinator at SEWA Delhi, a non-profit working with informal sector women workers, asks who will regulate working conditions of domestic or home-based workers. “Who is the primary employer? This question is not answered in the Codes.”One of the main industries that employ home-based workers is the beedi industry. Anna Gowri, 64, president of the Beedi workers union in Tirunulveli and Thoothukudi districts, explained that every alternate day, contractors come to her village in Melapattam in Tirunulveli, to distribute raw materials such as tendu leaves, nool (thread) and tobacco. The target is to complete rolling 1,000 beedis in two days. Home-based workers work all seven days a week, from 9 am to 4 pm, she said.Summers are particularly stressful. “We cannot use a fan while working. To roll the leaves, they need to be wet. The fan can dry them out,” said Gowri, adding that women work under trees outdoors if it becomes too hot inside. A 2024 study published in the Indian Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, that surveyed 153 participants in Karnataka, including 85 beedi rollers, found that one-third work in rooms with inadequate ventilation.In extreme heat, 84% of home-based workers reduced their working hours, and 88% reported reduced productivity, all of which contributed to low earnings, found a survey, published in June 2026, by Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), a global network that researches on informal employment. Nearly 85% missed at least one day of work a month because of heat-related illness affecting themselves or a family member, the study found.In addition, home-based and domestic workers often labour for longer than eight hours, making them more prone to exhaustion in times of heat. A 2022 study of 524 domestic workers published in the Indian Journal of Labour Economics estimated the average working hours for part-time and full-time domestic workers at 4.3 hours and 9.2 hours, respectively, in Ahmedabad and 6 hours and 10.4 hours, respectively, in Kolkata.Often, paid and unpaid labour also converge for many women workers. Neha Sharma, 27, lives and works at her rented house in New Delhi’s Raghubir Nagar. Through a contractor, she gets work such as stitching, machine tailoring and fixing beads. Work never stops for Sharma. “Through the day, I clean, cook three meals a day, and take care of my son, husband and in-laws,” she said. Between all this, she allocates five hours to attaching beads to fabrics on 5,000 pieces and another hour to make rotis at an employer’s house. “We have a cooler at home, but we use it only at night in the summer. The electricity bill will shoot up if I turn it on during the day. We cannot afford that,” she said.A 2019 article written by Jena highlighted that workers who use home as a workplace face innumerable challenges, such as lack of adequate facilities in terms of housing, sanitation and provision of basic amenities.Extreme weather events can also damage the products home-based workers make. Extreme rain, for instance, damages beedis or stitched clothes stored in the home, said Pandey. She hopes that governments construct community centres with enough ventilation and storage facilities, where workers can work and store products safely. The 2026 WIEGO survey asks for minimum wage and social protection to protect workers from health risks and a drop in earnings due to prolonged heat. But implementing minimum wages for unorganised workers is challenging, as we explain below.Code on Wages provides for minimum wage, but no monitoringThe Code on Social Security, 2020 states that monthly wages of wage workers (which includes domestic and home-based workers) “may” be notified by the central and the state government.The Code on Wages, 2019 subsumed the older Minimum Wages Act, 1948. Under the act, minimum wages were applicable only to scheduled employment, covering 30% of the workforce. State governments were empowered to include domestic workers in scheduled employment, Santosh Kumar Gangwar, the former Union Minister of State for Labour and Employment had said, in a written reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha in 2017.The new code asks the Union government to fix a statutory floor wage, based on the minimum living standards of a worker. Based on this, state governments set their own minimum wage, which shall be above the floor wage. This minimum wage would be applicable to all organised and unorganised sector workers, under the new Code.Currently, the Union government is yet to set a new floor wage under the Code on Wages; the last existing National Floor Level Minimum Wage across the country, which was non-binding, was fixed at Rs 176 in 2017. Also, the new code does not provide a formula for the calculation of this minimum wage for domestic and home-based workers, said Santosh Poonia, director at nonprofit Aajeevika Bureau's Legal Education and Aid (LEAD) Cell.Rajasthan in its 2024 notification, fixed a minimum wage of Rs 923 (monthly) for one hour of domestic work such as cleaning, but it also takes into account the kind of domestic work. The time-based minimum wage is helpful, especially for domestic workers who work in multiple homes, said Kingshuk Sarkar, Professor and Chair, General Management & Public Policy Area at the Goa Institute of Management.SEWA demands that the government set a piece-rate minimum wage for home-based workers as they are paid in that manner.As per the 2023 Annual Report on Minimum Wages Act, 1948, the last such public report from the Labour Bureau, 19 of the 36 states and Union Territories have added domestic workers to scheduled employment. “However, no states have so far successfully implemented this as the domestic space is not recognised as work space in the labour law framework,” Sarkar explained.A 2025 paper on domestic workers, published in the International Journal of Law Management & Humanities, said that implementation of minimum wages was weak due to lack of inspections and absence of formal contracts. To a 2021 question in the Lok Sabha, the former Minister of State for Labour and Employment, Santosh Kumar Gangwar, said that there was no labour inspection scheme for home-based workers at the central level.Jena said a system of monitoring can be developed. For domestic workers, she said, resident welfare associations can register domestic workers to ensure fair practices and wages. “Labour inspectors cum facilitators can also play a role by setting up awareness camps in resident welfare associations.” She added, “for home-based workers, we need to ensure that written contracts with details on working conditions and wages are provided. This can help with compliance.”But because of a lack of implementation of the minimum wage, there is currently a large variation in what these workers earn. The amounts they earn cannot protect them from a drop in earnings due to extreme weather, Poonia said.Manju, the domestic worker in Faridabad, earns Rs 14,000, or Rs 467 a day, for working eight hours a day, seven days a week in three households. This is higher than the government-set daily minimum wage for domestic workers in 2023 of Rs 410.05 but lower than Rs 585.41 set for unskilled workers in establishments, industries or factories for 2026. The 2026 minimum wage notification does not specify amounts for domestic workers.In 2020, WIEGO’s published study on Delhi’s domestic workers found that they earned Rs 9,332 per month, with over 20% of workers earning less than Rs 142 per day, which was lower than the 2017 national minimum floor wage of Rs 176 per day, and the 2021 median of the minimum wages in different states of Rs 269 per day.Currently, for home-based workers, experts told us that a complex, and long chain of contractors are a part of the system, with commission being deducted by middlemen at every level. As a result, home-based workers get meagre wages.Neha Sharma, who attaches beads to cloth, earns Rs 100 a day for 5000 pieces through a contractor. As a cook at a household in Tagore Garden, she makes Rs 1,500 a month (Rs 50 a day). “Our wages have stayed the same over the last two years. When we ask the contractor, he tells us that he does not get enough money to pay us.”Selvam, who goes by one name, is a 64-year-old beedi worker in Tamil Nadu’s Melapattam village, who earns Rs 150 a day for rolling 500 beedis in about six-seven hours.Social security for domestic workers, home-based workers, but no mandatory registrationThe global risk posed by climate change threatens to undo decades of development, including poverty reduction efforts, and further exacerbate social inequality. Universal social protection and the fight against climate change share the common urgent goal of protecting both people and the planet, according to a 2026 report from the International Labour Organisation. But universal social protection for unorganised sector workers under the new codes is still uncertain.The Code on Social Security, 2020 subsumed the Unorganised Workers Social Security Act or UWSSA (2008), which said the National Social Security Board and State Social Security Board would recommend and monitor welfare schemes, which unorgnaised workers, including domestic and home-based workers, could avail.But this is continuing a system that has been unsuccessful in the past. Though one of the major goals of the previous UWSSA was to extend the social security net to all unorganised workers, there is almost no progress in increasing enrollment of workers under various schemes, according to a 2018 policy brief by Jeet Singh, researcher at the Rajiv Gandhi Institute For Contemporary Studies. A 2018 article published in Socio-Legal Review states that National and states’ Social Security Boards did not seem to possess any substantive power and were relegated to advisory and monitory roles.Shobha Karandlaje, the Minister of State for the Ministry of Labour and Employment said, in February 2026, that different social security and welfare schemes have been integrated with e-Shram, an online portal for registration of unorganised sector workers. These include 15 schemes, such as the Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana for health insurance and the Pradhan Mantri Jeevan Jyoti Bima Yojana (PMJJBY) for life insurance. The onus of availing social security, however, massively falls on the worker, experts told us.A 2025 paper published in the International Journal of Law Management & Humanities raised concerns on this digitised enrollment, explaining it ignores practical barriers faced by women domestic workers such as digital illiteracy and lack of smartphone or internet access, limited documentation or proof of employment as well as awareness about procedures. “Without a mandatory registration process for workers and their employers, most schemes fail at the entry point,” the paper said.Domestic workers in the National Capital Region spend the equivalent of three-quarters of a week’s average wage on a health-care visit, despite government schemes, according to a 2019 factsheet, based on a survey of 176 domestic workers. Also, over 80% have no access to maternity leave or old-age pensions, it added.When Manju had heat exhaustion, she did not access medical care, but drank water, rested for a bit, and headed to work. Usually, Manju said she preferred private clinics for primary healthcare as it is close to her home. She said her employer enrolled her for PMJJBY, which provides a life insurance cover of Rs 2 lakh on payment of a premium of Rs 330 per annum. She is not enrolled in PM-JAY, the health i