Context: According to International Labour Organization (ILO) new report report titled "Working from home: From invisibility to decent work", Few governments had a comprehensive policy for working from home in place.

Issue

• Before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, there were approximately 260 million home-based workers worldwide, representing 7.9 per cent of global employment. Of these, 56 per cent or 147 million were women, according to the report.
• There is a need to develop effective policies for home-based workers and ensure their proper implementation even as the practice had increased since the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic.
• As a result, those working from home, especially in low-income countries, continued to work in poor working conditions.

The report talked about three main types of home-based workers

• Industrial home-based workers, who are involved in the production of goods including artisanal production, such as making of handicrafts, rolling of beedis, making of laces, etc
• Teleworkers, who use information and communication technologies to perform their work remotely
• Home-based digital platform workers, who are ‘crowdworkers’ that perform service-sector tasks as specified by employers or intermediaries

Key Concern

• Despite contributing significantly to the economy, home-based working had remained “invisible”.
• Propensity of women to work from home — 11.5 per cent — was much higher than that of men (5.6 per cent).
• The report highlighted the plight of industrial home-based workers, citing the state of 2.5 million women rolling beedis (leaf cigarettes) in India. 
• These were among the “poorest workers in the world of work” and worked in pathetic and unsafe conditions.

ILO’s recommendations

• Governments need to play a major role to protect home-workers, ILO said. It strongly recommended them to adopt a national policy on home-based work.
• It called upon governments to develop and implement a gender-responsive legal and policy framework that provided equal treatment for all categories of home-based workers in relation to other wage earners.
• This included facilitating the transition of informal workers to formal employment.
• The report also said home-based workers needed to be counted better to record their earnings, hours worked and other conditions of employment.
• The labour registries needed to be revised to incorporate “place of work” and count those home-based workers who went missing due to poor labour registries. 
• Few countries had labour inspection schemes adapted for home-based work, the report noted.
• The report called for better compliance, legal protection, occupational safety and social security for industrial home-based workers.
• It said teleworkers were at the risk of working overtime and hence recommended the “right to disconnect” on their behalf.