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Briefing Note 7 Decent Work, Workers and their Rights
Decent Work
The primary goal of the ILO is to promote opportunities for women and men to obtain decent and
productive work in conditions of freedom, equality, security and human dignity.
How can the goal of promoting decent work be achieved? In the work of the ILO it is seen as the
combination of four strategic objectives:
1. Achieving fundamental principles and rights at work
2. Creation of greater employment and income opportunities for women and men
3. Enhancing the coverage and effectiveness of social protection
4. Promoting social dialogue
Gender and development have been defined as crosscutting issues to be mainstreamed in all ILO
activities.
What is a Worker?
The promotion of opportunities for women and men to obtain decent and productive work is a
challenging task because of the diversity in types of work. All workers should be reached: The
fundamental principle is that all those who work, both women and men, have rights at work. This
means wage workers in formal enterprises, but also the self-employed, casual and informal
workers, as well as the hidden, predominantly women workers in the care economy and in the
domestic scene 23 .
There is not yet a consensus, although it is growing, on the above-mentioned definition of workers.
Often, there is a misunderstanding about ‘workers’. People only think about wage workers in
formal enterprises and the public sector when talking about workers. But everyone who works is a
worker, whether they work as civil servant, informal sector worker, casual worker, homeworker or
as a house-wife or house-man. This misunderstanding can lead to excluding the most vulnerable
groups like informal sector workers, homeworkers and domestic workers from policies and
workers’ rights. It should be clear that these groups are also workers and have rights at work as
well.
Rights at Work
All those who work, both women and men, have rights at work.
In Cambodia rights at work are written down in the Labour Code 1997. Cambodia ratified 12 ILO
Conventions (see annex about the ILO and the session about rights at work). This means that
Cambodia formally accepts those Conventions and is legally bound to apply the Conventions.
Laws and regulations are adopted or modified in order to apply the Conventions. Furthermore, the
Conventions must be applied not only in law, but also in practice.
23 from: A Partnership of Equals, ILO Geneva, 2000
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