Workers at Centre Stage: Building Worker Power in Climate Action
This event brings informal workers to the centre of the India Climate Week conversation, foregrounding their capacity, agency and lived expertise in navigating heat and a changing climate.
This event brings informal workers to the centre of the India Climate Week conversation, foregrounding their capacity, agency and lived expertise in navigating heat and a changing climate. Rather than treating workers as subjects of climate policy, the day creates space for them to narrate their own experiences, share the ways they are already coping and adapting, and deliberate collectively on the challenges and demands they want policymakers and institutions to address. It also asks what can be done to strengthen and scale effective worker-led responses with the right forms of support.
The day opens with a workers’ narrative panel, where workers from different sectors including waste pickers, home-based workers, street vendors and domestic workers — share their experiences of heat and climate change in their own words. This is followed by a short film screening that widens the frame, highlighting patterns of climate impact, adaptation and resilience across workers and geographies.
Building on these experiences, a workers’ workshop brings participants into cross-sectoral groups to reflect on the coping and adaptation strategies they already use, what these strategies cost them, and what support would make them more effective. Groups will then identify concrete demands from government, employers and other institutions, producing a shared, worker-authored set of priorities for the discussions that follow.
A street theatre performance offers a creative and accessible way to reflect on the themes emerging through the day. The event closes with a panel bringing together perspectives from climate, urban policy and practice to respond to the experiences and demands raised by workers. The discussion will focus on moving from worker experience to policy response and from individual coping to systems that can support, strengthen and scale what works. The findings will also feed directly into the following day’s programme, which brings together government stakeholders and other policy actors.
PARTNERS: WIEGO - Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing, SEWA and Janpahal