ILO. Toolkit for Mainstreaming Employment and Decent Work. Geneva: ILO, 2007.

 

Decent work has been defined by the ILO and endorsed by the international community as being productive work for women and men in conditions of freedom, equity, security and human dignity. Decent work involves opportunities for work that is productive and delivers a fair income; provides security in the workplace and social protection for workers and their families; offers better prospects for personal development and encourages social integration; gives people the freedom to express their concerns, to organize and to participate in decisions that affect their lives; and guarantees equal opportunities and equal treatment for all.

The Decent Work Agenda is a balanced and integrated programmatic approach to pursuing the objectives of full and productive employment and decent work for all at the global, regional, national, sectoral and local levels. It comprises four pillars, namely:

• employment creation and enterprise development;
• social protection;
• standards and rights at work;
• governance and social dialogue.

Its multifaceted nature and emphasis on the centrality and universality of human productive activity means that the Decent Work Agenda connects, interacts and intersects with major areas of economic and social policy and also with the issues of human rights, poverty reduction, economic growth, social integration and cohesion, democracy, security, sustainable development and practically all sectoral policies which fall within or cut across the responsibilities and mandates of different parts of the multilateral system, including the Secretariat, funds, programmes and specialized agencies of the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions and the WTO.

The Toolkit for Mainstreaming Employment and Decent Work will be instrumental in fostering greater policy coherence and convergence across the broad range of interlinked actions of the multilateral system, in line with the international agenda agreed globally and subscribed to by all countries. The Toolkit is designed to be a lens that agencies can look through to see how their policies, strategies, programmes and activities are interlinked with employment and decent work outcomes and how they can enhance these outcomes by taking full account of the implications of their policies, strategies, programmes and activities for employment and decent work during the design stage and while advising and assisting countries and constituents with regard to their adoption and implementation. The approach of the Toolkit is very similar to that adopted during the gender mainstreaming process in that it provides the user with a checklist of questions to raise awareness of the interlinkages between decent work and the different themes and policy domains of the respective agencie.

The objective of the Toolkit is to facilitate the assessment of linkages and the realization of the potential contribution of the policies, strategies, programmes and activities of the international agencies, individually and collectively, in terms of their employment and decent work outcomes. The Toolkit contains a list of key questions organized according to the four pillars of the Decent Work Agenda, to guide the agencies in:

• determining whether their policies, strategies, programmes and activities may affect employment and decent work outcomes in their different dimensions at the global, regional, country, sectoral and local levels;
• exploring how the effects of these policies, strategies, programmes and activities are, or could be, taken into account or assessed in a more systematic way; and
• promoting concrete ways to optimize employment and decent work outcomes in
  their policies and operations, ideally at the design stage.

 

Complete document: http://www.ilo.org/public/english/employment/skills/career/download/career_guidance.pdf

 

 

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